All you need is a C

Feb. 12, 2004

Dear Leslie,

Among the various jobs I had in college, ringing up groceries at the Pak-A-Snak, playing in a soul band and delivering flowers on Valentine's Day were the best. None of them paid much, but they remunerated in another kind of currency.

The Pak-A-Snak probably was Cape Girardeau's first convenience store. The owner, a crotchety all-businessman named Porter Stubbs, sold a little bit of everything, including the world's best chicken salad, in a low-slung building with big bay doors kept open during the spring, summer and fall.

I was shy, so Mr. Stubbs, a widower, sometimes without my knowledge arranged dates for me with young female regular customers. He had a good eye, too.

Mr. Stubbs could be cantankerous. He also kept stacks of Connie Francis albums in a storage room at the back of the store. When I asked why, someone told me they belonged to Mr. Stubbs' late wife. I never heard him play the albums. I never had to dust them either.

I'm not sure the soul band had much soul. A talented black man named Willie Bollinger was the lead singer. He was our parents' age, had more costumes than Cher and could make up songs when we ran out. "Give me a C," he would say. We'd vamp and noodle all over that C chord while "ooh baby" and "Doncha know I love you, love you, love you" purred from the speakers at the frat party or high school prom. Willie loved love songs.

Then he would turn to the band and shout "Modulate," which meant we were about to play the same song again in a different key without stopping. The technique carried a band that hated to practice through lots of dances. Willie's charm and voice made it work.

The question is, what were a bunch of white college kids doing playing songs by Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett? The answer is that we were doing the same thing the Blues Brothers hit on years later: Playing good music people of any color couldn't resist.

When Willie died last year, people of every color came to the funeral home.

Every Valentine's Day in college, I drove a van for a florist and delivered flowers. The flowers went all over town to women of all ages. Some were from sons or daughters to their mom, some from husbands to wives, most from boyfriends to girlfriends. But the women's reaction when they opened the door and saw the flowers in my hands was always the same: They melted and then beamed.

I hadn't done anything but deliver the message but basked in the love being reflected back all the same.

Note to fellow men: Deliver the flowers yourself. If you don't, you don't know how much you're missing.

DC doesn't particularly like getting flowers, at least she says so. So far, she hasn't convinced me. She barely knows who Bruce Springsteen is but gets misty over his song "If I Should Fall Behind."

"We said we'd walk together baby come what may

That come the twilight should we lose our way

If as we're walkin' a hand should slip free

I'll wait for you

And should I fall behind

Wait for me..."

Love changes everything and everyone.

Happy Valentine's Day,

Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.