Encounters of the Weird Kind

     It was a Tuesday.  Barbershop day.  Or night.  We usually would meet at 7 p.m.  Four of us were to meet at 6:30 this particular evening.  We were putting together a quartet for Thursday.

     We had to practice, put together a quartet, because our regular baritone retreats to the land of the wiki-wacki every January and doesn’t return until April or May.  Thursday would be February 1.

     Three of us arrived promptly at 6:30.  The fourth guy wasn’t the one we were waiting for.  He was there to attend another meeting.  We were familiar with the other group.  They, too, meet at the same church on Tuesday evening.  They put little yellow arrows on the hallway floor that point the way to their meeting.

      We struck up a conversation with the guy.  He asked us what we were doing there.  Barbershop we told him.  “My brother sings barbershop,” he said.

     Really, where, what’s his name, etc.? We asked.  Missouri, Kansas City, somewhere east of us.  Farrell was the last name.

     Farrell?  The name struck a bell. Any relation to Katie Farrell? I asked. 

     “My mother,” he replied.  Really!  I rummaged through my music and brought out a handwritten arrangement written and arranged by Katie Farrell.  I handed it to the guy.  “Yeah, that’s her.”

      I thought I remembered getting that arrangement in St. Joseph Missouri where the Barbershop Harmony Society used to hold their “Harmony University” for a week every summer on the campus of the college there.  I thought the guy who handed it out said Katie was his stepmother.  I couldn’t remember his name (imagine that) and the guy couldn’t help me clear up my misty recall.

     He was having memory issues of his own.  He couldn’t remember the name of his brother’s world champion quartet.  Actually, his brother Fred has been a member of two world champion quartets, “Second Edition” (gold medal in 1989) and “Crossroads” (2009).

      Fred Farrell’s brother and Katie’s son and not in barbershop?  Here he was in our clutches.  He confessed that he used to sing.   We got him to sing a tag with us, but we didn’t do a very good job.  Rex tried to get him to abandon his scheduled meeting and attend ours.  The best we could do was getting him to say he might attend on another Tuesday evening.

     The City of Loveland endeavors to leverage its name, and its nickname, the Valentine City.  Since the 1940’s, you can send a stamped addressed envelope to Loveland in January and the first two weeks of February and have it postmarked with an official “Loveland” stamp.  (I got one from my sweetie way back in 1969.)

      A local Rotary club sells “hearts” to suitors.  For the month of February, lovers can wear their hearts on the lampposts of Loveland.  You give a Rotarian your brief message and a fee.  They paint the message in white on a red heart and mount it on a light post or some other public place, mostly along Highways 34 and 287 that cross each other in the center of town.  All during the month of February, commuters can view the messages of endearment.

      The Valentine City Chorus, the local affiliate of the Barbershop Harmony Society to which I belong, clings to the shirttails of the romantic tide that flows through the city in February.  We sell singing Valentines.  The problem for us is to get our product in front of the public.  Advertising is expensive.  Singing Valentines are our main source of income these days.

      Solution.  Our illustrious leader who has lived in the area all his life (graduated from Longmont in the 50’s) usually gets us into the Chamber of Commerce on the morning of February 1, the kickoff for the envelope-stamping program.   The news media is there with writers and photographers.  This year, and other years, a Channel 9 camera crew filmed the activities.

      In December, the Chamber of Commerce sponsors a Miss Valentine competition.  Miss Valentine gets to say a few words during the February 1 opening ceremonies.  She then cancels the stamps on the first Valentines with the special Loveland imprint.  The first one this year went to California, the second one to Texas.

     Often the mayor or a City counselor addresses the group.  A quartet (our quartet this year) sings a couple of love songs.  Our spokesman reminds everyone that we sell singing Valentines. Cell phones click, cameras flash, the TV camera rolls.  We hope we make it into the newspapers, maybe even on TV news.   It gets our message out.

     Thursday February 1, we were to be at the Chamber offices by 8:45, in time for the 9 o’clock meeting.  I arose, looked out the window, at the three inches of snow that fell unpredictably. 

      We were to meet at IHOP at 7:30 to rehearse our two songs.  We felt the rehearsal necessary because our regular baritone, as already mentioned, translocates to the Land of Leis every winter.  His substitute is a seasoned veteran of thirty some years, but still, there might be TV cameras there.  No room for error.

     Two of us arrived at 7:30, one at 8:00.  Ted was coming from north of Ft. Collins.  Southbound I-25 was closed by the collision of two trucks, one of which was hauling fuel.  The hazmat folks were hard at work.  Ted arrived at 8:55.

       We watched the proceedings for 15 minutes until our turn.  Things went well.  We even got called back to sing a third number after we did our two regulars.  Normally, we would have gone our separate ways, but we had a funeral to sing for on Monday.

       The family requested “Precious Lord”.  We all needed to brush up on that one. We had never sung it with this combination of guys.  There is more than one arrangement of the song.  Back to IHOP we went.

     We asked for a back room so we could sing.  Five guys at another table were ordering their breakfast as we were seated.  We thought we would wait until they were done before we started singing.  Then, an older couple was seated near us, and a single lady soon followed.

      We couldn’t wait all day.  We thought about relocating to someone’s house or the church where we meet on Tuesday nights.  But the roads were lousy and it would take some time.  Ted had an appointment.  We decided to sing and take our chances of getting evicted.

      We ran “Precious Lord” four or five times, with stops and starts throughout to get it right.  We gave it one final run-through, then moved on to “Lord’s Prayer”, which the chorus was asked to sing for Monday’s funeral.

      The single lady who came in after us was the first to leave.  She stopped by our table.  She had tears in her eyes.  Your first thought is that we did such a bad job singing that it made her cry.  We DID do a bad job some of the time.  But she thanked us.

      She said her husband, 20 years older than she is, was in the hospital waiting for a place in a rehab facility to open up so he could leave the hospital.  She was going through a difficult time in her life.  Our singing had given her a lift and encouragement.  She actually enjoyed her breakfast, she said.

     The older couple exited soon after the single lady.  The older woman went on out to pay the bill.  The old guy, about 5’6” and probably close to 300 pounds stopped by the table. He told us he was an American Indian (he didn’t say Native American), a Ute, he told us when we asked.  He started life in Taos, New Mexico and moved to Timnath with his parents.

       He spent five minutes telling us about his life and giving us a mini sermon.  He had lost a brother recently.  He, too, appreciated our singing, a breakfast concert he called it.  He thanked us for being brave enough to sing songs of faith publicly.  He told us that he used to hate people, until he saw the light.  He told us how important it was to tell people you love that you do love them, to ask for forgiveness while you are still alive, because “when you’re gone, you’re gone.”  It will be too late when you are dead.  

      It wasn’t eleven o’clock in the morning yet.  What a day we had already had.  No one asked us to cease and desist.  We left IHOP without an invitation to do so.