Forty years ago or so, I recorded portions of a Nevada textbook, Battle Born Nevada, for the blind. That excellent little book by Don Lynch and David Thompson, surfaced today, and I took great delight in reviewing the inspiring words of Sarah Winnemucca, as she described a courting ritual of the Paiute.
“The courting is very different from the courting of the white people. He never speaks to her, or visits the family, but endeavors to attract her attention by showing his horsemanship.
As he knows that she sleeps next to her grandmother in the lodge, he enters in full dress after the family has retired for the night, and seats himself at her feet. He does not speak, but if the young woman wishes him to go away, she rises and goes and lies down by the side of her mother. He then leaves as silently as he came in. This goes on sometimes for a year or longer, if the young woman has not made up her mind.”
Wow, that is so different from my courting experience. I met my future wife at a backgammon tournament. As news director of WOCB Radio in Cape Cod, I was covering the tournament with a remote broadcast on a very slow Sunday, and there she was! But as I approached her with my microphone she waved me off as though I were a 150-pound wasp.
Once I put the microphone away, she allowed me to approach her, introduce myself, and invite her to a Bruins game that night. She tossed her hair, informed me she already had a date for that game, and turned her attentions to the backgammon tournament. I was defeated, and my heart, as I knew it, was broken.
While watching the Bruins on TV with some friends that evening, I shared my heartache with them, then stepped outside to flip some burgers. That’s when I heard the shouting, “McAvoy, get in here!” I stepped inside too late to see what they told me was a pretty girl in the crowd holding up a sign that read, “Hello, WOCB News!” Had my heart been a frog, it might have leaped clear across the room.
She had told me she worked in a dress shop in Hyannis, so the next day I went looking for her, and was ever so happy to find her.
“That was really something that you did last night.” I stammered.
“And what was that?” she asked.
“The sign!” I almost shouted.”
“What sign?” she asked with a sympathetic smile.
It then occurred to me that I had been bamboozled by my own dear friends.
I apologized, excused myself, and went for a run to vent my misery. Then the unexpected happened.
While running along my training route for the Boston Marathon I saw a handwritten sign in a garden on the side of the road. It read, “Hello, WOCB News!”
She had found out that I was training for the marathon, had gone out there herself, and placed several signs along my route that read, “Hello, WOCB News!” And the last one was adorned with a blood red heart.
So, though different in procedure, a Paiute courtship and a WOCB courtship both ended up in blissful marriages.
Want to hear McAvoy Layne tell it? Go here for an audio version of this column. For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”
