Lovejoy

I was having dinner at Bucky's bar at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, when I saw an older distinguished man sipping a martini and staring through the back window at the horizon of the Gulf of Mexico as the sun set. And I knew him-not his name or the name of the woman he was missing and privately toasting with his small sips of that martini. But I knew him, and the concentration of his memories filled the space around him and drew me to him, like a love song. Like the great old love songs I grew up singing. Those songs fit his story. When I got home, I wrote this story that happened to me when I saw a man whose name came with the sunset and the martini and the black grand piano he kept eyeing longingly: Franklin Lovejoy. So, in a way this story is autobiographical. I never met the man but Franklin Lovejoy happened to me. LOVEJOY was inspired by a real-life sighting of a man who had been deeply in love and as it turns out with more than one woman. It's part of the mystery of writing that stories come this way from chance encounters or in this case, a chance sighting. This is Lovejoy's story-and mine, in a way. I hope it will be one you enjoy too.The love story begins in a Southern church where desire for God is often confused with desire for a lover. Lovejoy happened to a Southern belle who, at first, admires the eligible older man from afar. Here's a little bit of that first spark between Lovejoy and the woman who, like others, couldn't say no to this man who had a way with the ladies.Excerpt from Lovejoy:I was past my prime but not yet old when I met my match, Mr. Lovejoy. The distinguished widower had been part of the background of my community, an old Southern church where tradition is as romantic as the scent of magnolia and the fragrance of the gospel is as abundant as the scent of that flower that ladies in social clubs use for tabletop centerpieces.Through a natural reluctance to join myself to a ladies' social club that defined me by my gender or marital status, I kept myself apart in the Southern society where God had placed me. I lived on the perimeter where spectators observe and often have opinions. In Sunday school I sat near the wall. In church I sat near the back, where I was occasionally shaken out of my church-time reverie when I heard a man belt out "Amen" whenever the preacher made a point that might have gone without attention otherwise.Heads turned at the sound of one of us agreeing out loud with the preacher. Eyes widened to discern the rebel among us-- the man of the Amen. He wasn't hard to spot. The man who vigorously agreed with the preacher was Franklin Lovejoy, a widower of two years.A handsome man, Mr. Lovejoy sat by himself five pews up from me, and often I watched with amusement the number of ladies who attempted to establish a stronghold beside this older available man. They came and went. I don't know what he said or didn't say that did not encourage the ladies to return. Some...