Border Agents I have known: Doris Walker

Christmas never passes without Doris Walker coming to mind – my violin teacher, that is. For years, Doris was as much Christmas as decorated evergreens or gifts under the tree.

The formidable Mrs. Walker came into my world as I ended third grade in ’64. For the next 9 years she taught me violin and for decades more we played music together – especially at Christmastime.

To be honest, I was not the most serious of violin students. Don’t get me wrong. I loved – and still love – the instrument and flourished by her side as we scaled endless runs and fingered breath-taking harmonies from the makeshift orchestra around my mother seated at First Assembly’s organ. I just didn’t like to practice.

The only dread I had of Doris was at Tuesday afterschool lessons when she’d ask me if I’d been practicing. No use fudging. She knew. But still she kept coming and teaching me along with my siblings. She and dad had an arrangement – she’d teach all four of us kids for the same price as one, as long as it was the same amount of time. I’m not sure she paid attention to the time that much.

Every week, she’d arrive at our house, let herself in, and give me a lesson, ready or not. Every Sunday morning and every Sunday evening, I’d follow her lead, sitting by her side in the crowded orchestra “pit” – Doris on the outside so she wouldn’t poke the guitar players with her dancing bow.

While I was starting out, she’d harmonize my straight melodies. Later we reversed roles, though there was nothing straight about her melodies – ever. Quickly I learned the art of Pentecostal jazz – Spirit-led improvisation, that is. A mistake is never a mistake if you can turn it into a grace note, she’d say. Her life was filled with grace notes.

Doris taught me far more than music. Intermixed with all that fingering and bowing, words flowed, revealing her love for God and her zest for life. It didn’t matter the setting or who might overhear her, she was full of vitality and not about to hide her indomitable spirit – if that were even possible. Nothing got her down; if it did, she never let on.

Like the time she drove over her violin case with her prized violin inside. She got out of the car, picked up the case, prayed over it, and when she opened it, the only evidence of the accident was a thin line on the surface of the violin. The instrument played as beautifully as it ever had.

Like the time thieves jacked up her car sitting on the back side of the church during an evening service and stole all four tires. It became yet another story of God’s grace, though I have long forgotten what grace was in that story.

Like the time vandals broke into her van parked inside her garage, stole her cheap student violins, smashing her priceless one and dumping it in a gravel pit, while scattering music sheets to the wind. It became a lesson in how naïve those vandals were, not knowing the value of the old, worn treasure, instead preserving the comparatively worthless mass productions.

Everything was a lesson for her – and a lesson from her. To be with Doris Walker was to learn from a master teacher.

She certainly had greater challenges than just those few troublemakers. Her mother died after a long illness, family and friends had struggles, her beloved husband, Ellis, disappeared while fishing in the bay, his body never recovered. She was a champion of those in need – physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually – pressing forward on their behalf at every turn, taking them tirelessly to the throne of grace in prayer. Never get in Doris’ way when her mind was set on making good out of bad.

She was convinced God would never leave her nor forsake her, that nothing could ever separate her from His love. She truly believed all things were possible to those who believe. And she was firmly convinced that it was her job to share all these good things with everyone she met. Those weekly lessons were as much about faith-building as they were about fiddling.

That’s why I call her a border agent. By that I mean someone willing to journey into the edges of their world and communicate whole other worlds to the uninitiated. She was an ambassador. Of music to those who could barely hum a tune. Of strength for those who were sinking under the weight of a thousand concerns. Of eternity for those who could see only the Here and Now.

The last time I saw Doris was at my sister’s wedding in 2012. Her hearing had been weakening for some time. Her body struggled feebly to keep up with her spirit – just like the rest of us had tried to keep up with her for years. And her driving, well, that was as it always had been. Like her father, she was someone to avoid on the streets.

Yet, as age was taking its toll, her faith remained intact, confident as ever that she was standing firmly on the Solid Rock. As I wrote the day she died, “No doubt where she is tonight. No doubt at all.”

And that was what was most uncanny about Doris. She had this ability to see the unseen, to hear what to the rest of us seemed unhearable. Somehow, somewhere she had gotten hold of the truth that God is ever present with us.

I’d see her playing her violin in worship and knew she had bridged a supposedly unbridgeable divide between the temporal and the eternal. Eyes wide open, singing loudly as she played, bringing sounds out of that violin meant for the One who was above and beyond, I felt at times as though I was sitting next to a portal to heaven.

We Pentecostals would talk about being lost in God’s presence. I’m not sure I’d say she was lost as much as she had her feet firmly planted in both places at once – the tangible now and the eternal beyond. She managed to be here and there at the same time.

Doris expressed that rootedness in every part of life – in her devotion to God’s written word, her love for music, her thrill at all things good and pure, her commitment to people.

She taught those truths to young and old alike. For several years I assisted her in children’s church and summer Vacation Bible School classes as we taught squirrelly pre-Ks. With adults, she was, as my brother says, as formidable a teacher of biblical truth as anyone he knew.

I really don’t know where it all came from. Though I never met her mother, I was privileged to know Dad White, who outlived his wife to the ripe old age of 99. Clifford E. White worked in the office of Prince’s lumberyard down on High Street, Millville’s narrow commercial drag. He retired four times, the last not clocking out till closing time the last day of December his 90th year.

After final retirement, he tried Florida for a while. But he grew bored, if the term can be used of Dad White. By that I mean, he offered his services in Florida churches only to discover that old white-haired men were a dime-a-dozen down there.

So, he moved back to South Jersey where people knew him and the gifts he had to offer – and started doing home visitations, serving communion to “shut-ins”. Then he flew out to Seattle, he and Ellis accompanying Doris who played at our wedding, all on their way to tour Australia.

Dad White was a man of faith, a faith he passed on to Doris and her sister, Anna. Anna was a musician in her own right, an organist who, unlike Doris, never played by ear. Born in New Hampshire and a lifelong Methodist, Mr. White took his family to Trinity Church after moving to Millville.

For a while after she began teaching me, Doris attended Trinity Sunday mornings and our Pentecostal church Sunday evenings. She said it was the best of both worlds, and she attempted to bring those two worlds together. I tried to explain to her that our playing a meditative adagio as a duet wouldn’t go over too well with our low-church crowd, but she pressed on as if it made all the sense in the world. “Pentecostals meditate, don’t they?” she stated more than asked.

I’m not sure what Doris brought of Pentecost into the staid Methodist experience at Trinity, but by the time the family asked to move their memberships to First Assembly, Trinity’s pastor had already given up on Doris. She could go, he wrote my father, First Assembly’s pastor, but he wasn’t about to lose Clifford.

The problem was Doris and her father were Methodists in a very old-fashioned Wesleyan sort of way, which means they were rooted in John Wesley’s dynamic understanding of life in the Spirit. Which means that, by the time of their move, the family felt more of the spirit of Wesley in our church than in Trinity.

Doris, an entrepreneur (she was a private music teacher and a member of the American Federation of Musicians Local #595), had become active in the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. Started in the 1950s by a California rancher and son of Armenian immigrants, FGBMFI had become by the 60s a fast-spreading charismatic laypeople’s organization. And somehow FGBMFI became a bridge to our church. Those were the heady days of the mainline Charismatic movement and First Assembly was a welcoming congregation.

Doris didn’t empty out the other churches in town – her goal was to bring them all into the same vibrant faith she had wherever they happened to belong. Still, she connected two of my schoolteachers with First Assembly.

Staid Miss Mabel Miller, from whom I learned sentence diagramming in the 9th grade, and inquisitive Mrs. Luella Dreyer, my Algebra and French teacher, became a threesome with Doris in later years, frequently seen together at our church. I can’t remember who was Methodist and who was Presbyterian – our town was mostly Methodist – but either way, they were introduced to our Pentecostal church by their good friend, Doris.

Luella Dreyer still attends, now at the ripe old age of 105. Like Doris and Dad White, Luella took to visiting shut-ins, many of them younger than her and, like Doris, became an ambassador for a deep, abiding faith.

That was Doris’ way, always connecting people, always bridging gaps, always drawing people in. Always inviting herself into people’s homes. She was the only person I knew who mom allowed to let herself in our front door without knocking – and not just for weekly lessons.

Everywhere that Doris went, she took her violin and Jesus. I remember that trio best at Christmastime.

Disregarding the bitter weather as snow fell, we’d take our violins and go sing carols to shut-ins, playing outside their homes or in their crowded front rooms. We’d play our way through the hospital, back when Millville had a hospital, carolers singing, me playing, and Doris doing both. And we’d do the same through the halls and down the stairwells of the town’s senior high-rises.

Long after I moved away, I’d return for Christmas. By then, the church had a Christmas Eve service and we’d sway in our seats, playing our violins.

Pick any carol and, in my mind, her fingers are all over it to this day. How we could riff through the chorus of “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful” or the runs of “Angels We have Heard on High”! I still cannot sing them straight, nor unsee the light that danced in her eyes. That light still reflects for me the spirit of Christmas.

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Photos: With me in 2004, Luella Dryer, Miss Mabel Miller, Doris Walker (on the right)