The Man in the Blue Flannel Shirt

            It was a late autumn afternoon, one of those crisp perfect days in the Deep South when the humidity goes down and southerners begin to feel spared, invincible, able to cope again after the grueling summer.  The sun peeked through the long needle pines and soaked the world in a honey light as my host dropped me off at the Pure Station on Highway 61 somewhere in northern Mississippi.

            One retreat behind me, another starting the next day, I was heading to Memphis.  Highway 61, sometimes called the Blues Highway, runs from New Orleans to Minneapolis right through Memphis and St. Louis.  I remember feeling a kind of writer/artist’s romance about the whole thing.  Like the writers who gathered around the Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in the 1920’s or expats who fled to Paris to write poems with fountain pens while they walked by the Seine, I was traveling a path about which songs were written.

            “The Bus Station is that little room on the side,” my driver told me as she helped me with my ‘before-wheels-were-standard-suitcase.’  “Don’t let time get away from you,” she continued.  “Because if you aren’t standing outside when the bus comes by he won’t stop.  That driver doesn’t like to stop.  They say he likes to drive but he’s not so sure about people.  Okay, then.  You got what you need, Eugenia?”

            I looked at the empty service station, closed on this Sunday afternoon, and at the open door into the little side room.  I hoped fervently that I had what I needed.

            “Yes, I’m fine,” I said.  “Thank you so much.” 

            “No, honey, we thank you,” she said giving me a quick hug and sinking back down into the soft leather seat of her Lincoln.  She needed to get home.  It had been a full weekend and she was steeling herself for whatever had transpired while she was away.  You could see it in her, almost smell it on her.

            I was exhausted, not so much from the leading of the women’s retreat but from the sheer effort of keeping my mouth shut after the University of Alabama rather spectacularly proved that God was in heaven and all was right with the world by beating Ole Miss something like 60 to nothing.  I hadn’t said a word, not even when the hangdog Rebs had goaded me a little. I was feeling pretty righteous about it, too, as I dragged my suitcase into the little room; briefcase and purse tucked under one arm.

            I wore my 80’s “I am woman” suit, a plaid skirt that looked like it had been dyed in the piles of leaves outside the station, rust colored pumps that matched my hair and a big shouldered nubby jacket over a silk charmeuse blouse. I was on the road working in leader development for women for the PCUSA and it was a heady wonderful time.

             A rusted sign hanging on a swaying chain was the only indication that the room I entered was indeed the Greyhound Bus Station.  It was a small room with white plastic chairs lining three walls and an old bare mattress on the floor in one corner.  The word ‘clean’ did not leap to mind but I wasn’t afraid to sit down either.  I had two hours to wait for my bus so I got out my notes for the next event and sat to go through them one more time. 

            A little while later, a young man, maybe 30-35, came into the station.  He picked up a bus schedule from the little Lucite rack by the drink machine and sat down across the room from me. He studied it seriously as long as he could. 

            He wore a blue flannel shirt with golden lines. He had it neatly tucked into his jeans.  I’d like to say that his belt buckle said Ole Miss, but I don’t really remember that.  What I remember is that he had dark wavy 70’s hair, and deep eyes the color of the shirt with tiny golden sunbursts.  They were beautiful eyes. 

            I kept right on working.

            After a few moments he asked, “Where you headin’?” 

            “I’m going up to Memphis,” I said.  “You?”

            “St. Louie, for me,” he said. 

            “Ah,” I said.  There was silence.

            “You traveling on business or for pleasure,” he asked eyeing my briefcase and sizing me up. 

            “Business,” I said. 

            “Oh,” he said, “What line of work are you in?” 

            “I’m a Presbyterian minister,” I said brightly.  Then came the double take.  I watched it in him. 

            “Oh,” he said.  “Well, do you pastor a church or are you a roving evangelist?”

            I laughed.  “I’m a roving evangelist I guess,” I replied.

            “Well, son of a gun,” he said.  “I’m a believer myself.  I got saved back in May of 1969.  Have you saved any souls yet?”

            I laughed.  “I’m still praying,” I said. 

            “Well, you keep on praying.  You’ll get one.” He was trying to comfort me.  “Where you from?”

            “Alabama,” I said.

            “Oh, Lord,” he said.  “Y’all sure handed our butts to us yesterday, didn’t you?” I smiled and the conversation went on to the safer ground of college football and the social ordering of southern self esteem that it provides.

            I have thought of him often over the years.  Not so much the blue eyes to match his shirt.  Not the sideburns just a little past fashion.  Not even really the surprise that registered as he tried to fit this young woman into his image of minister.  What I’ve gone back to again and again is the idea of being a roving good news person. 

            For nearly 30 years while pastoring churches or serving in judicatories, I’ve roved the highways and airways to towns too many to remember.  30 new suits. 5 new briefcases. Souls saved?  Not a clue, that being the Spirit’s business and not mine, of course. 

            Still, as I sit now in my ‘chair of inspiration,’ laptop on lap, I think of all the faces of the thousands of strangers I have taught or preached to over the years. I wonder if real good news somehow leaked from me in some way. I pray that it did.

            There is a vast good news shaped hole in the heart of our culture, the core of our hearts. It is a gaping hole dug deeper by the evening news, the betrayals of life and love and body. I think of the young me sitting on the Blues Highway with a briefcase full of hope and plans, and no notion whatsoever of real Blues. She makes me smile.

            But now I do know.  I know of blues and success, of failure and grace. And I know the wonder of my own Blues Highway on which I have been found by Grace and saved again and again and again. I want that same small triumph for all those who find themselves stumbling into life, scraped up and unheld. I want that for those who find no solace in church, no news at all in Christ, the roving evangelist we follow.

                        “You keep on praying,” the man in the blue flannel shirt said. “You’ll get one.” 

                        And so I rove on.