Goldie and Seth

In the mid-thirties, Tillie and I were real church-goers. We went to youth group, prayer meetings, regular Sunday services, vacation Bible school, choir--you name it, and we were there. Actually, there was no other place to go in that small town--if you wanted to see people and have any special activities at all, you went to your respective churches--Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, or Pentecostal. And who your social peers were depended on which church you attended.

Tillie and I always sat right down in the second row on Sunday morning at the Baptist church. We didn't want to miss a thing, and and we thought the seat -back in front of us afforded privacy from the minister's and choir's view. The rest of the congregation, except on special occasions, tended to congregate in the back of the sanctuary-so there was this block of empty rows between us and them. We were blissfully ignorant that two heads bobbing all alone in the second row were not "invisible."

We would whisper and giggle and, just crossing into the teens, we were thinking about "romance." We woud leaf through the hymn books and pick out all the hymns we could find with titles like "Love Divine," or "Love Everlasting."

One Sunday morning in the midst of this untoward behavior, I felt a sudden very sharp poke in the middle of my shoulders. One of the women in the congregation was sitting right behind us and we were feeling the tip of her big black umbrella. It was Goldie, one of the proprietors who ran the grocery store down at the corner. She was a tall, dark lady, and at that moment she had a very big frown. That put the fear of God into both of us. Cease and desist became our middle names thereafter.

Goldie's husband, Seth, was the the typical "opposite attracted." A white haired, slow speaking man, he was an almost invisible presence beside Goldie. I remember him as the man behind the counter whenever mom sent me to get our molasses bottle refilled. I would take the empty jar and Seth would set it under the spigot of a large cask. The molasses would run out so slowly you could have read a whole chapter of a book by the time your jar got full. Whenever we thought of Seth , we thought of him as "slower than cold molasses" which was really unfair.

Years after I left town, I heard that Seth had passed away, and that Goldie had gone out west to work with the Indians. It was said that she had contracted tuberculosis there and had died. She had apparently had a heart of gold, but Tillie and I hadn't recognized it.