FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER!

I was a junior in college when Jimmy Carter was elected president.  I had a late class that Tuesday, and when I got back to the sorority house where I lived, my sorority sisters had made a dummy of Jimmy Carter and had hung him in effigy – those girls were daughters of Republicans. It made sense. They all had more money than I did.

My grandfather was a Democrat and voted a straight Democratic ticket. Because he did, my mom did. Because my mom did, I did.  I hadn’t really considered Gerald Ford as president. He was a klutz who fell in public. See how young people decided who should be president?

Anyway, Jimmy was cool. He was a peanut farmer and not a hardened politician. He’d been governor of Georgia, so he did have some experience. He had a big smile and a lovely wife.

When Jimmy passed away this week, he was 100 years old. His wife of 77 years preceded him in death. News about his funeral and viewing have been on the nightly news.

Today I arrived at my beach town in time to clean up the front and back yards and to visit my favorite thrift stores for tea cups. I have a new client, a restaurant owner who wants all his dinner plates mismatched. Two or three weeks ago, he bought 65 plates from me and told me he’d need that many every 2 months and could I help him out?

I was going through a stack of plates – rooster, good, Las Vegas with dice, good, vintage floral, good, and then, lo and behold, a presidential plate with guess who in the center? Serendipity! It was Jimmy Carter.  Of course I had to buy it, not for the restaurant guy but for me, for this story, for the memory of that Tuesday evening when all the girls were horrified that he’d been elected. 

Oh, the look they gave me when I walked into the apartment suite. I was tired, and it didn’t really register right away who the stuffed dummy was supposed to be until I heard one of them say, “She’s a Democrat!” as though that would be enough reason to blackball me from the sorority house.

One of the younger sisters (let’s call her Bonnie) scolded me one day by saying, “Why do you always wear that same top, over and over again? Get some new clothes!”

I was horrified and couldn’t tell her that I was a poor sister with no extra spending money for things like new tops. I either made my tops or bought them at thrift stores, long before that was cool.

So, here’s to Jimmy, his wife Rosalyn, their lives of service, their favorite charity Habitat for Humanity, Jimmy’s commemorative plate, thrift stores everywhere, and a sunny day at the beach!

The waves were huge.