Short Story: Marian In High School

Marian was in choir in high school, she adored singing, and she and the choir would put on concerts for everybody in the town. There was a girl, named Emily, who was older and could play the piano by ear. Gathered around the piano, the choir girls stood, mesmerized by her.

“Can you play this?” one girl said, humming the ‘I Love Lucy’ theme song.

“Oh yeah, that’s easy,” Emily would say, and she could play it. The girls loved to sing with her, and anticipated the extra time they had at a rehearsal or concert. Marian stayed in choir all through high school, because her family couldn’t afford an instrument for her to play in the band.

Marian earned her work ethic from the best - her mother. Ma would slave away for hours in the strawberry and

Kennedy, President at the time, was assassinated, she was working at the Mobile Home Insurance Co. Marian sat at her desk, working, when she heard her boss call, “Everyone, into the conference room, quickly!” Confused by his tone, she got up and followed her coworkers to the meeting room. There, the news was on, and the anchors looked panicked. After a few seconds of watching in terror, everyone gathered what was going on - the President had been shot. Marian comforted her crying coworker, but was skeptical of what she had just seen. “I don’t believe it,” Marian said skeptically. “How can you not believe it?” someone else said, defensively.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she answered. When she got home, she saw it on the news again, and realized it must be real. She was worried for the future of the country, but after she prayed about it, she knew everything would be alright.

When Marian was 17, she started dating her first boyfriend, her only boyfriend before meeting her present husband. They dated for four years, and

She worked at Walmart for 22 years, starting in 1992. Marian did lots of volunteer work throughout her life. The Helping Hands group met at Christian School once a month. They had projects like putting on a dinner for a business. They would get donations of food and the ladies from the community would donate jello salads and desserts. In the fall they had the Dutch Kitchen bazaar at school. They made apple dumplings, which took 20 bushels of apples! Peeling, coring, washing apples were parts of the process. Then they rolled out the dough, cut the squares of dough, put the apple in the middle, and filled them with cinnamon, sugar, and butter. They wrapped it up in the dough and put 6 of these on a tray. They would bag the trays and freeze them at the grocery store freezer and pick them up a few days later after they were frozen, to sell them at the Dutch Kitchen. The Helping Hands group probably raised $20,000 each year for the Dutch Kitchen! It was a fundraiser to keep the tuition down for Christian