Queen for a Day

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Ray’s daddy was born in 1915. He was the beloved only child of Ray’s grandparents, whom Ray called Notty and Granny. On birthdays when Ray’s daddy was a little boy, his parents circled his plate with dimes.

I remember two favorite birthdays from my childhood. Mother gave me a fun party with lots of friends when I was in second grade. On one of my pre-teen or early teen birthdays, Daddy came over to me at about 10:00 p.m. during my birthday party and said, “Now you are __” (I’ve forgotten the year). It was precious to me that he remembered the time of day I was born and took the opportunity to share that moment with me.

My fifteenth birthday was memorable for very different reasons. The girls at our high school had a tradition of pooling their dimes and quarters to purchase a corsage for a friend’s birthday. When you turned Sweet Sixteen, your corsage had sixteen sugar cubes wrapped in illusion. On your seventeenth birthday, the florist tied on seventeen Lifesaver® candies. On my fourteenth birthday, I remember a single chenille bumble bee.

For everyone’s fifteenth birthday, the corsage had fifteen dog biscuits that dangled from ribbons. I have no idea where these traditions started or whether it happened anywhere else except in Ashland City.

My birthday fell on a Monday that year. We went to school that morning with the sad knowledge that our school principal had been killed in a car accident during the previous Thanksgiving weekend. When my friends gave me my corsage, I couldn’t bring myself to wear it. It simply did not feel proper to wear it on a day of mourning.

My parents took Steve and me shopping in Nashville almost every Monday night. Daddy took off one way and Mother, Steve, and I took off another. Sometimes we’d run into each other again during the evening, but we always met up at 9:00 o’clock when the stores closed. That’s when we all went to the Krystal on 5th Avenue, where we each had a small burger and a drink for $1.00 or maybe less. I think each item was a dime.

Well, I had my dog biscuit corsage and I hadn’t gotten to wear it, so I put it on to wear while we were shopping. While we wandered through one department store after another, a teenage boy saw me and asked, “What are you? Dog queen?” I thought it was hilarious!

When I was a child, women used to appear on a game show called “Queen for a Day.” That must have been a fun dream come true kind of experience — way better than Dog Queen for a moment.

Every day we have the opportunity to make someone else feel like queen for a day or king for a day or perhaps prince or princess for a day. Birthdays are a nice time to do that, but so is just any day at all.

Be devoted to one another in brotherly love;
give preference to one another in honor;
Romans 12:10

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