She's a salesman with nothing but a small Texas town that loves her
MT. VERNON -- It's taken 85 years, but anybody wondering how Pollyanna Cavett wound up here, old and bent, hawking baseball card-sized portraits of Jesus with a Saint Francis of Assisi prayer on the flip side need only ask.
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"I weighed two pounds when I was born in a potato cellar during a cyclone in Lawton, Oklahoma. They put me in a shoe box and here I am," she said, punctuating the nutshell version of her life with a little heh-heh from a range of laughs that goes from tinker bell to baritone howl.
Even if stumping for the Catholic Church on the town square during Countryfest is a tough sell, she was having a good time. Why not?
It was a sun-split autumn Saturday, cool enough for a sweater. Music wafted for hours across the square, coming from a bandstand on the corner where the only people in town who didn't sing were the people who didn't want to. A breeze laced with the smells of food from concessions and wood smoke from the stew cookoff behind the depot drifted across the plaza.
Pollyanna took a position out in front of the Catholic booth, pushing aside tracts arranged neatly across a folding table that served as the front counter, making room to prop herself up, putting aside the walking cane.
Less aggressive parishioners chatted in the shade of the awning, but she worked within reach of a parade of friends sauntering by, face turned up beneath the hump of bunched shoulders, big smile flashing every time she recognized somebody.
"Here, honey," she said, hooking the wrist of a passerby in the bent claw of tender fingers, drawing one in for a free picture of her Saint of the hour. "Read the back - it's a beautiful prayer."
That's it. A soft sell.
"I'm a wonderful salesman," she said, launching into her Oshkosh story. That's in Wisconsin, where she lived a few years just after World War II.
She worked at Woolworths, in the children's department, next to a display of artificial flowers.
"The home office called and wanted to know why all of the sudden we were ordering so many flowers," she said. "They never sold many flowers, until they got me." Heh-heeee!
"They were so pretty, whenever I got a customer at the baby counter, I'd always take a moment to show them the flowers."
The Woolworth's manager wasn't the first to recognize and promote her.
"When I was 15 I was the first girl drum major in San Antonio," she said. It was 1935. "If there was anybody in the world more important than me then, I didn't know about it."
Barely out of her shoebox, she was three months old when her mother took her to the depot and put her on a train for Plainview, Texas. A grandmother waited on the other end of the line.
"She put me in a seat on a pillow and asked the conductor to make sure nobody sat on me," she said.
Later, she lived some time in San Antonio, where her mother had moved. She never knew much about dad.
"He drank a lot," she said.
When not with mom, she lived with relatives in Plainview. The manager at Woolworths made her his assistant, but she left after two years.
"I had an aunt in Plainview who needed a home," she said.
She had a head for business.
"My grandmother made payments on her house for years and years, so I figured that out," she said. She put down $200 on a house, but said every payment she made went straight to the principle. "Whatever interest was due, I said I'd pay that once a year. I guess it suited them. That's what we did."
She moved in her aunt, got a job in Plainview and rented out two rooms of the house to pull the deal together.
She'd never expected such a thing, but Strange walked into her life two years later. Strange.
That was his name, and there's a short tale about that, too.
"When he was born, the nurse called in his father. There were mother and baby, cuddling in the bed -- his daddy looked at him and said, 'That's Strange.'" Heh-whoooo! A friend crossing the street shifted the story line.
"Carol!" the old woman's voice was gone, shifting to a drum major's bark that cut through the crowd. Carol Horn looked up, smiled and came over. Carol has VIP status.
"I'm in charge of refreshments at Pollyanna's funeral," she said, citing to Pollyanna's approval her instructions about food.
"I want everybody to sing," Pollyanna said. "Don't you love music?"
Watch for the obit in an upcoming edition of the Mt. Vernon Optic Herald.
"It's important that you come," Pollyanna said. "It's the last chance I'll have to say exactly what I want said to my friends." It's all scripture.
Pollyanna turned easily Catholic after moving to Mt. Vernon and finding there wasn't a handy Episcopalian Church.
"That doesn't matter. I'm for them all."
In 53 years as a church organist she played for all kinds of churches.
She was 28, Strange was 48, the most wonderful man. Whooo-ahhhh, she said, a laugh, then a sigh drifting into another thought with a whimsical sound.
"Ahhhh, he could sing. We didn't know it. When I started teaching him we found this rich baritone, like an instrument."
They were lay ministers, hospital workers for 40 years, mostly in Colorado. They sang together. When Strange went blind, he learned all the old hymns by hear and kept singing. When he got cancer, she kept him on his feet.
"I just didn't let him sit down," she said. "I kept him going, kept him singing. He was so strong, until right at the end."
She blinked.
She looked about. Her old family back in Plainview had long since returned to the earth. Strange's family was gone, too. She found work in a monastery in Southern California.
"It was so peaceful, but it was so hot," she said.
Strange was born in East Texas, a place she'd never been. She got tired of the heat. She got out a map, closed her eyes and her finger came to rest between Mt. Vernon and Mt. Pleasant. Doing the next logical thing she called the chamber office in Mt. Pleasant, found a realtor, sent her possessions ahead in a truck and got on a plane, just like she'd once been put on a train, except with no waiting grandmother on the other end of the line.
Time passed. She had a house in Mt. Pleasant for a while, moved to Plainview for a while, then came back and bought a house in Mt. Vernon. As she became frail the house became more than was handy to keep. She tried an apartment before Sonny Patel made her a special deal at Motel 8.
Sonny has a heavy accent, decidedly un East Texas, but tenderness cuts across cultural lines.
"She's not like everybody," he said. "She has no complaint about anybody. She spends so little for herself, just reads all day, but like yesterday, these people from Canada with all of the children, broken down, no money - she cares so she helps, you know?"
Business is business and Sonny has a mind for it, mortgage and staff, utilities and overhead. It's balanced with heart. "I talked to my partner, you know? For someone so different as her, there should always be a place."
"Sonny made me a deal," Pollyanna smiled. "It's a nice room." She goes to the lobby in the mornings, when breakfast and coffee are served and she visits with travelers. She's savvy, Sonny said, reading reactions in a glance.
"She talks to people. She touches this one's heart, another one makes a sour face. She moves away, but nothing changes her."
She's written a song about her aging Dodge, a "splendid car."
She drives herself around town, but never on the highway.
And as much as she looks forward to her eternal life, she's in no hurry to leave this one. She has friends here. She'd like to outlive her Dodge. She wants a motorcycle with a side car.
"Wouldn't that be fun?" she mused, and she smiled.