The Witness Dream Lady

In "Friday Night Lights," not the original movie but the subsequent TV series, there are two female characters that make it much more interesting than it would otherwise be, being that it centers on the sensationally trivial subject of high school football in Texas. The dream character that I want to talk about today is Tami Taylor, the wife of the coach, as portrayed with incredible enchantment by an actress named Connie Britton, shown here:


I have a theory that I would very much like to have verified, a notion that several weeks ago, just such a woman, accompanied by an extremely otherworldly-looking wisp of a girl of about 13, appeared at my door one Saturday morning. They were Jehovah's Witnesses.

I suspect that the local Witnesses have a special warm spot in their hearts for me, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if, somewhere in their Kingdom Hall, wherever that may be, there's a list of the soft spots for them to visit on their required missionary forays, and my name is at or near the top. I even flatter myself that quite possibly they rarely visit anyone else on this road except me, given that, though nice folks all, to various degrees they are a salty bunch, and I can't see any of them being nearly as agreeable to listening to the Witness thing as I have been through all the 30 years that I've lived here, even if without the slightest intention of ever going farther than that.

Though she did the usual Witness thing, this lady was special in her assertiveness, and because she seemed to know already that I do artist things, and I think that if I had invited her in so that she could see some of my paintings and stained glass, nothing would have delighted her more. But when a dream lady suddenly steps right off your movie screen and into your doorway, you're too stunned to do more than just to wonder what the fates are up to here, and by the time she and the girl did their little talk and gave me the two pamphlets and left, I realized that I hadn't even snapped a clear picture of this woman with my mind's camera, so that later I could to some extent verify that all-too-fleeting first impression.

So ever since I had been waiting for her to reappear. I knew she would soon enough. Something, and including things she had said, told me that she was far from finished with me. I was the fish that she knew would be waiting near the boat the next time she decided to drop her line.

So what happened? Erroneously thinking that the Jehovah Witnesses moved around only on Saturday mornings, yesterday, Wednesday, I was at the other end of the house, all wrapped up in writing my post about Hiroshima and the atom bomb, when somebody knocked and my wife answered. Unaccountably, instead of also going to see who it was, because a knock on our door doesn't happen often, instead I stayed nailed to my computer table, much too absorbed in finishing that post.

A little later my wife showed up and told me that I would be glad to hear that she had just saved me from again having to deal with the Jehovah's Witnesses -- she is not nearly as tolerant of them as I am. And she said it was the "Friday Night Lights" lady that I had told her about, this time accompanied by another woman, an adult, instead -- they always show up in pairs.

To get to my house it's necessary to pass my workshop, and I had left both doors wide open and the lights burning. The lady told my wife she had gone there first, and I wondered if she had stepped inside and taken a quick look around. But she told my wife she had just taken a peek, and that she saw "a lot of pretty things."

As for her likeness to the Connie Britton character, predictably my wife's verdict was that I had carried that a little too far.

So what else can I say? What should I say? --Except that a man deserves to have all his theories tested and either verified or, less happily, discarded, sooner or later. So, later. (Smile.)