The Calling Dream

Chapter 4-3

“I…I don’t know what to tell you,” I replied.

“Well, tell me about your life,” she said as she drove.

I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell her at that point. Finally, I decided I would just tell her about my childhood, growing up out in the butt crack of Arkansas on a farm, boring stuff, I thought. Still she seemed to be very interested. I told her about Grandma, Momma, Daddy, and Sissy. I told her about Teddy and how much I looked up to him. I struggled to hold back tears when I told her that he had died recently.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” she comforted. “That must have been devastating for you. I remember you saying that during our phone call.”

“What about your life?” I queried, hoping to get the attention off myself before tears came.

She took the bait and began to tell her own story. I found out that she had originally been from a small town in Kansas and that her husband, David Moore, died tragically in an auto accident. He had been a business partner with Mr. Clayburn in the Christian Broadcasting Ministry. He was a fair amount older than she was and, at the time of his death, was fifty-one, and she just was twenty-five. They had never had any children. At the time her husband died, as a widow of a business partner, she owned part of the ministry. Mr. Clayburn bought her out of her husband’s part in the business then offered the option to work with him on further developing the ministry, and she took it.

I told her that Teddy had also died in a tragic accident. However, the conditions of her husband’s accident had been quite different. He was on his way home from his office one day when a woman ran a red light and broadsided him on the driver’s side of the car. A piece of the door frame broke off and impaled him through his abdomen. He was maintained in a hospital for about two days before he finally passed away, and this had been very heart breaking and difficult for Wanda because she had been deeply in love with him and expected to spend most of her life with him.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, seeing emotion rise in her as she was telling the story. “I have no idea what that must be like. I loved my brother deeply, but it has got to be different when you lose the person you expect to spend your life with.”

“You’ve never been in love?” she questioned.

“No, I guess I haven’t,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “I’ve really only seen one girl, and my daddy put a stop to that. I liked her a lot, but I don’t know that I was in love with her. I’m not sure I know what that kind of love feels like.”

“Why did your dad stop you from seeing her?” she asked.

I hesitated in my embarrassment and most assuredly hesitated on just how much I was willing to tell her about what happened with Lynetta. At last I said, “We were doing something we shouldn’t have been doing.”

“Having s*x?” she asked.

I felt my face flush with heat at her directness, and I know I must have turned beet red, but she thankfully had her eyes more on the road than on me. I wasn’t sure how I should answer, or if I should just change the subject and avoid the question entirely. I mustered my courage. “Yes,” I said, finally. “It was wrong. I knew it was a sin. I knew better.”

“How old were you then?” she continued.

“Fourteen,” I replied.

“Kids don’t quite understand the complications of those things,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Still, what kid at that age doesn’t have the urge to explore? The time in our lives when we are expected to save ourselves for marriage is the time when our hormones, urges, and curiosity are the most rampant. It is harder for teenagers to resist things like that than it is for adults, but we expect them to just be celibate.”

I felt a strange mix of emotions. The lust I had for Wanda was mixed with my embarrassment at my confession and my guilt for having s*x outside the sanctity of marriage, and I was shocked by the response I never would have expected from a Christian woman. I was wondering if I had said too much too soon when I realized we were passing through Jonesboro. I felt a little safer when Wanda didn’t judge me, but still I wondered if I should have held back a little more from a person who was still very much a stranger.

Just by crossing over the Mississippi Bridge north of Blytheville, we could have gotten from Pocahontas to Nashville in about the same amount of time it takes to drive from Memphis to Nashville, but Wanda turned south toward Memphis. She apparently had the route planned to go through Memphis so she could stop by her office. At the time, I didn’t know enough about the other side of Jonesboro to realize the difference. Between Jonesboro and Memphis, the conversations circled around the mundane musings of life in the 1950s, and the conversation lightened considerably. I thought about asking questions about Christian broadcasting, but I wasn’t sure exactly what to ask or how to ask it. I assumed I would be shown everything I needed to know.

We pulled up to the sidewalk in front of Wanda’s office at about 10:00 a.m., and it wasn’t much, just a little one-room space she rented in a brick building on the northeast edge of town. I found myself walking into the office looking at religious pictures on the walls when she said, “I’m sorry to take you the long way around, but I’m going to be in Nashville with you all next week, and maybe the week after as well, so I have a few loose ends I need to get tied up before I’m out of the office for that long. I simply didn’t get the chance to do much with it yesterday.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “No problem.” Truthfully, I had not known, until that moment, that we were taking the long way. It didn’t matter to me anyway. While Wanda worked at her desk, I wandered about the room and stood for a while looking at the building across the street. Sunday traffic was scarce, yet still it was more common to see a car pass than it would have been at home. I would rather have sat and stared at her intriguing beauty, but I knew it would be unseemly and might cause her to feel uncomfortable. “If the broadcast ministry is in Nashville,” I asked, “why do you have an office in Memphis, so far away?”

“My husband was from Memphis,” she replied. “David’s family is here, and though we were only married a few years, I still have a good relationship with his parents. He only had a sister. She contracted childhood leukemia and died when she was about fifteen, so at this point, they have no children. His father is disabled, and I just like to be nearby in case they need me. My own parents are younger and are doing quite well. Besides, my role in the ministry doesn’t require me to be in Nashville. Most of the time I am researching new venues and ways that we might expand the ministry. I can be in telephone contact for most of that.”

“Oh,” I said, politely. “His parents are very blessed to have you, then.”

“I’m blessed to have them,” she replied. “They are wonderful people.”

I wanted to ask about her husband and the fact that he must have married late or had been widowed or divorced to be so much older than she was, but I didn’t want to pry. Instead I asked, “If you are going to be a while, do you mind if I take a walk around the area?”

“Certainly, go ahead,” she replied. “The area is called Hollywood. You might find it interesting, and the Hollywood Café is just up the street here.”

“Really?” I asked, “Like Hollywood, California?”

“Sort of.” She smiled. “Just not quite as much glitz and glamor as one might expect from the stars.”

“How long do I have?” I questioned.

“Give me about another hour, maybe,” she replied. “I don’t think anything will be open today, but you can window shop.”

“Good, then I’ll see you shortly,” I said as I stepped outside the building. Since I couldn’t comfortably sit and stare at Wanda Moore, I needed some distance to quiet my groin a bit.

As I walked, I noticed spring flowers blooming in flower cases along the street, and it was a particularly warm day for March. I perused up and down the street for quite a while, peeking in windows here and there, curiously noticing things that were different from home, even though it was less than a two-hour drive away from home. I found a little shop with Asian trinkets displayed in the window. There were curious little porcelain figurines of various sizes, and in the back, I could see what appeared to be embroidered tapestries. I was leaning in, holding both hands over the sides of my face to get a better look into the back of the store, when I was startled by a car horn. I jumped half out of my skin and turned to see Wanda sitting there in the Eldorado. She had pulled up to the curb behind me without my slightest notice. As soon as she saw me jump, Wanda burst out laughing. “I’m sorry.” She giggled. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Oh, you are a vixen,” I heard myself exclaim without even realizing what I was saying until it was out of my mouth. “You should be spanked.”

“Come on. I’m done.” She grinned. “Are you ready to get back on the road?”

In my wandering, I had lost track of the time, and the hour she allotted me had already passed. “Yes, ma’am,” I smiled as I slid onto the leather seats of her car.

“Stop calling me ma’am,” she chastised. “I may be a little older than you, but I’m not your school marm.”

“Okay, I will work on that,” I said as she pulled away from the curb.

“Are you ready for lunch?” she asked. “There is a truck stop up here on Highway 70, and we can have a bite there.”

“A truck stop?” I asked, never having heard the term before.

Wanda smiled but was not critical of my ignorance. “It’s a place where truck drivers, carrying freight across country, stop to have a meal or refuel. They have a café open there.”

“Well, I definitely am ready for a bite to eat.” I grinned.

“Good, then we will stop there,” she exclaimed.

In very short order, we were pulling into a large parking lot with a big Standard Oil sign at the edge of the road. It was filled with big trucks, and there was a bank of gas pumps and a red neon sign over a building at the back of the lot that said, “Café.” I had seen big trucks like that before but never really thought about the fact that they might be going all the way across country or that the truck drivers might need to stop and eat sometime.