[This is a true story from my book, Christmas Memories From Seven to Seventy, available in paperback from Amazon.com.]
I gave Pansy an engagement ring a few days before Christmas 1964. But you could say it began at Thanksgiving.
It was the day after Thanksgiving when I first told her I loved her. And I remember her exact words in response: “I don’t know whether I love you or not.” That response stopped me cold in my
tracks, but not for long.
She was teaching high school English in Charlotte, North Carolina. All through the fall months, I had made trips up from Anderson, South Carolina, about 120 miles away, where I was teaching at Anderson College, a small junior college sponsored by the Baptists.
I was beginning to feel something deep within myself which I had never felt for another woman. Because I hadn’t been down that road before, I had little to compare it with, but I thought this was
love. I felt comfortable at the thought of spending the rest of my life with her, and I was hoping and praying she might feel the same toward me.
That began to seem likely when her sister and brother-in-law, Gay and John, invited me to stay with them in Charlotte a couple of nights at Thanksgiving. So, up I went. We had a big traditional
turkey dinner at John and Gay’s. Though I wasn’t in the kitchen to see for sure who was the chief cook, I was optimistic that the sisters were at least equal partners.
The four of us spent some time together, and Pansy and I spent some time alone. Our last moments together were on Friday morning before I headed for home. That’s when I told her how I felt and heard her noncommittal response.
Admittedly, I didn’t choose the most romantic time or place. I was thirty years old, but I could have been a gawky adolescent on his first date when it came to mapping out a plan for opening my heart.
About all I knew of Charlotte was the route to the place where Pansy was living. As I drove around town, I looked for a safe, quiet place to stop. I discovered a college campus which I correctly
guessed would have no classes during the holiday weekend. So I drove around the campus and found an empty parking lot in broad daylight.
We sat in silence as I was trying to find a way to say what was in my heart. After an eternity, Pansy broke the silence: “A penny for your thoughts.”
I said, “Is that as high as your bidding goes?”
She smiled and said, “Two pennies?”
Then I said, “I was trying to think how to tell you I love you.”
“Are you telling me?” she asked in a voice which did not sound encouraging.
“Yes. I love you.”
More silence. Then her reply which made my heart sink.
Because I hadn’t “been there and done that,” I hadn’t thought through the various possibilities of how she might respond. So I swallowed my Adam’s apple and my pride as I asked, “Well, could I come back to see you next week?”
She said, “That would be fine.”
As I drove along I-85 toward home, I started mentally composing the first real love letter I’d ever written – the first of several I would write during the week, before I would see her again.
The next Saturday, all afternoon and evening as we were together, I kept thinking, “Is this a good time? Is this a good time?”
I tried to say something while we ate supper, but she turned the conversation away. That made me feel less than confident.
When we came to the house where she had a room with an elderly lady, I parked the car and said to myself, “Well, let’s see what happens.” I figured she would at least let me walk her to the door before shaking my hand and telling me, “It was nice knowing you.” I turned off the engine, and we sat in silence a few seconds, my nerves a-jangle.
She looked over at me with her deep, dark eyes and said, “Lawrence, I love you, too.” In the quietness of that moment of our first embrace, I felt sure her landlady would be awakened by
the sound of my heart pounding like a jackhammer.
I never asked, “Will you marry me?” She and I both understood the meaning of my declaration of love the week before and her reciprocal reply that night. So, instead of hurrying to her door, we
sat in the car, exulting in our newly declared mutuality, making preliminary plans for our wedding.
So it all started at Thanksgiving. Or, could you say it started the previous summer when we rediscovered each other, thanks to some mutual friends?
Pansy worked that summer at Ridgecrest, a Baptist conference center near Black Mountain, North Carolina. Those mutual friends asked me to come up to the center on Saturday and Sunday to help
with a workshop they would be leading.
Jim and Dottie and Pansy and I were all in seminary together a few years earlier: Pansy and Dottie were roommates, and Jim and I were close friends.
So I guess you really would have to say it began in seminary. Jim and Dottie got married after seminary. Pansy and I knew each other there but had not dated. Women were a tiny percentage of
the student body at most seminaries. That was true of our school in Louisville, Kentucky. So most of the unmarried men were aware of most of the single women.
After seminary, the next time the four of us were together was at Jim and Dottie’s wedding – Pansy a bride’s maid, and I a groomsman. We acknowledged each other’s presence there, but that was about it.
Pansy had worked at Ridgecrest a summer or two before that year when we all converged for what proved to be a weekend of destiny. I had seen her in those earlier summers and chatted with her when I attended meetings at the center.
I accepted Jim and Dottie’s request to help with their sessions during the summer in question, not suspecting they were praying and scheming for something more significant than my helping them
for a few hours.
Dottie was subtle enough in her Danielle Cupid role: “You remember Pansy Hopkins, don’t you?” she asked me.
“Sure. You and she were roommates in Louisville, weren’t you?”
“Yes, and did you know that she’s working at the registration desk here?”
“Well, I haven’t seen her yet this trip,” I said. “But I knew she worked there other summers when I’ve come up.”
Dottie didn’t say much more than that. She didn’t have to.
I’d gone with a number of girls in college but never had a real steady. Then, during a year of teaching in a small North Texas town before going to seminary, I didn’t find many available young women. In seminary, it was the college story again: some dating but nothing regular.
Still, I never intended to remain a bachelor. I’ve often said, if I didn’t believe anything else in the Bible, I would believe Genesis 2:18 –”Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’”
But how did it all begin for Pansy and me? It almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if I had gone to seminary in my native Texas instead of coming east to Kentucky and if Pansy hadn’t taken a two-year detour from school teaching to go to that same seminary.
Whatever the ultimate starting point, our plans for life together began to take more definite shape a week or so before Christmas when Pansy came to Anderson for a weekend.
I hadn’t been confident enough to buy the engagement ring before I heard her say the magic words. But that night in my car in front of her house, I offered her my college ring. My knuckles are so big that Pansy could almost put two of her fingers in my ring.
But she took it as an earnest of a smaller, more feminine ring. In the meantime, she stuffed cloth or cotton in my class ring so it would stay on her finger. As I looked at the ring on her finger, the Beatles
song rang in my mind: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Now, with sufficient confidence, I went to a jewelry shop on Main Street in downtown Anderson and had sympathetic support from a sweet, elderly Southern lady who had years of experience helping young men as each struggled to find the right ring at the right price for his Miss Right.
I was one of several faculty and staff members living in an apartment complex owned by the college. Among my colleagues, I discovered a veritable fairy godmother in Anna Hoover, a dorm mother who spent most nights on campus supervising female students. She offered her off-campus apartment for Pansy on the weekends she would come to town.
When Pansy arrived on that first visit, we went to a restaurant for supper and then to Mrs. Hoover’s apartment so Pansy could get settled in. Then, I removed my heavy college ring from her finger
and replaced it with a more permanent one.
On her first visit, the campus was full of the excitement and beauty of Christmas. The college had only a few hundred students, and I knew many of them personally. They knew I was single, and word had quickly spread that I had a lady friend.
That night, after I gave Pansy the ring, we went to a choir concert. As we entered the auditorium, I heard whispers of, “Hey, who’s that Mr. Webb is with?” I felt as if we were in a spotlight and all the students could see the sparkle of the ring.
After the concert, the women’s dorms had open house. Doors were decorated with candy canes and Christmas scenes. Others had shiny wrapping paper and bows, turning the room into a huge gift. I felt I had my gift at my side as girls in the rooms gave knowing grins.
Sunday morning, we went to church, then spent the afternoon giving Pansy a chance to get acquainted with some of my close friends on the faculty.
Later Sunday afternoon, we went back to the campus where we had left Pansy’s car. With the short days of December, it was dark before I realized it. Pansy said little about it, but I knew she was all
too aware that night had fallen as she anticipated two hours-plus of driving home alone on the interstate.
Rather than going directly to her car on the front campus drive, I delayed her departure a bit longer. I found a shadowed spot away from the students where we could kiss and embrace. I told her again that I loved her and heard her say once more, “I love you, too.”
With those declarations, the sparkle of Christmas hope was in my heart as I held her hand and looked at the sparkling ring – a token of bright anticipation of our life together.
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