The
Christmas of 1977 was one of those years that Christmas Day happened to fall on
a Sunday.
I was in my
first year at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. In order to earn additional money for tuition
I accepted the position as church organist in September at a large church in
Lexington, KY, and when I was hired, it was agreed that I would play throughout
the Christmas season. That meant I would not be home for Christmas in Baltimore
that year.
I had begun
dating a young man from Texas named Michael Johnson, but when the fall semester
final exams were over he went home and I stayed in Kentucky to fulfill my
obligations to the church. When the dorms closed I ended up staying at an
apartment that a fellow seminarian had rented.
He went home for Christmas but was thrilled to let me use his apartment
so that I could take care of his Siamese cat named Butch. Butch was a strange cat. He insisted on
sleeping with his head on the pillow with me every night, and he even snored in
my ear, which made the whole lonely Christmas scene yet a little more bizarre.
I was
determined to be brave about being alone for Christmas in a strange town, with
a strange cat, being employed by church people
that I barely knew. As each student finished
exams and left for home, my bravery began to slip away into full-blown home-sickness. After all, aren’t we all supposed to be home
for Christmas? Wasn’t there some song
about it that Bing Crosby sang during World War II?