The warmth of Marilyn: A friendship woven with joy

When I asked Marilyn Settlemyer if I could write a column about her, she insisted she wasn’t that interesting. “You know lots of people more interesting to write about,” she said.

“Marilyn!” I cried. “Don’t you remember playing tennis with me?”

She did laugh at that. Our games took place long ago when everyone in Morganton seemed to be playing tennis, discussing their trophies and those incomprehensible scores that used the positive word love for that bleak word zero?

One day, when we were getting sick of the word love, Marilyn suggested we give ourselves a point every time we hit the ball over the net. Thus began the highlight of my tennis career. I’ve rarely laughed so hard and never gotten so many points.

I met her shortly after moving to Morganton in 1974.

My husband had started his first job as an attorney. We’d rented a two-bedroom, cinder-block house on Highway 64 for ourselves and two children. I had no car and no local friends. Even so, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to a gathering for attorneys on Mineral Springs Mountain Road. I was looking for a friend, not a lawyer.

At the party everyone smiled and asked us questions, then gravitated toward one of the many groups around the room, where people talked and laughed as though they’d known each other for years, as though they didn’t notice how cold the place was.

“Maybe it’s warmer out on the deck,” I whispered to my husband.

Quite the contrary. But before I could say, “Let’s go back inside,” a couple walked through the sliding glass doors: Steve Settlemyer, whom my husband already had met, and his wife, Marilyn, whom neither of us had. She wore an engaging smile and a pretty sweater matching her outfit.

In no time, she and I were laughing and discovering how much we had in common. She noticed me shivering. “These parties are always cold, so I wear a sweater,” she said. “But I’ve warmed up. Would you like to borrow mine?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, but already she was taking her sweater off, claiming she had another.

Before we left that night, the Settlemyers invited us to come play bridge at their house. “I don’t know how to play bridge,” I said. Oh, they’d love to have us anyway.

We arrived early as was my husband’s habit. I suggested we wait in the car until someone else showed up, but in logical, lawyerly fashion, he said somebody had to be first. Why not us?

As he rang the bell, I heard the roar of a vacuum inside and a whisper, “Good grief. Someone’s already here.”

If possible, I liked Marilyn better that night than the first one.

In the days to come, she invited us to her church, local events, even bridge games, where I struggled to remember what cards I’d played and which direction to pass them.

She also gave good advice: “Leave a sock on the TV long enough,” she once observed, “and you’ll soon quit noticing it.” And, “Book clubs should not be about elaborately-prepared food, nor limited to people with the same opinions.”

Over the years, she’s given me compliments and commiserations, babysitting and recipe exchanges, laughter and honesty, and especially inspiration when after the birth of her third child she was given a diagnosis of early multiple sclerosis.

In 1985, my family moved to Bakersville, but Marilyn and I kept in touch; in 2006 when my husband and I returned, she welcomed me as though I’d never left.

By then, her house had not a mate-less sock in sight, but, instead, a beautiful hanging red quilt she’d made and a warm and window-rich sunroom she’d decorated.

On our second move to Morganton, she introduced me first to foreign language teachers who helped me get a job teaching Spanish as she did.

Later, she encouraged me to volunteer with her to teach English as a Second Language for the Burke Literacy Council and changed my life.

In these classes, I met people from other countries and heard stories that make shivering on a cold deck seem insignificant: Women forced to quit grade school, people punished for having the wrong religion; a 14-year-old left alone in the desert overnight; an established attorney from Moscow, here to escape war, who recently told me she loved Morganton.

These immigrants have welcomed me into their homes and churches, introduced me to foods I’d have never tasted otherwise, given me handmade purses more colorful than any I’d have chosen, and brought surprise plates of tamales to my house, as generous as Marilyn had always been.

But is she interesting?

She hasn’t, after all, traveled to the moon without complaining about the cramped quarters. Nor has she — as far as I know — performed in scant clothing for screaming millions, walked a tightrope across the Grand Canyon, sped through Morganton in a car chase, or solved world peace.

But if you don’t find someone interesting who’s stayed married to the same person, raised three children and grandparented more, transformed the game of tennis, kept a book club alive, is learning to walk well again after a second hip surgery, and still sharing old friends with new ones, please consider this:

Marilyn and I belong to different churches, are members of different political parties and run (metaphorically) in different circles. But always she greets me, with the same genuine smile, empathy, and generosity that she did the night she shared the only sweater she’d brought to the party.