A friend died last week. Perhaps, even in these days when we stretch the word “friend” on social media beyond recognition, it’s presumptuous of me to call her a friend. We’d spent maybe twenty minutes together over the last sixty years. But I still thought of her a friend.

Silvia Gaines Johnson was, in my opinion, a rare sort. For most of us, modesty isn’t much of a problem. I often think of Winston Churchill’s line about Clement Atlee: And he has so much to be modest about. But that wasn’t the case with Sylvia.

She was one of the prettiest girls in my high school class; one year she was the homecoming queen. She was Marshall our junior year, which meant that she was among the six best students in the class. She was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” our senior year. Her family was wealthy.

But none of that seemed to have a lot of effect on Sylvia. She was pleasant. She was friendly. And, strangely, she was modest. When she didn’t have anything at all to be modest about.

When I read that she had died, a couple of memories struggled to the surface. One was Sylvia, Jean Dale Freeman and a couple of others after what might have been basketball practice standing beside Highway 301 signaling to the passing truckers to blow their air horns. Most of them did. The girls were laughing a lot.

The other memory had to do with my asking Sylvia if she would go to a movie with my best friend. He evidently didn’t have enough nerve to ask her. She agreed, and we double dated. It was a very quiet night since my friend wasn’t much of a conversationalist. There wasn’t a second date.

Her son wrote that Sylvia had been dealing with dementia and Alzheimer’s for the last six years. She had been leaving those around her long before she died.

But, since I was not one of those around her, I still remember her when she was young, laughed a lot, and, like the rest of us, wondered about her future. That’s the image that’s frozen in my mind.

Some people rise above their beginnings. We call them “self-made.” Then there are people who are born to great beginnings, but don’t let those advantages keep them from relating to everybody around them. We don’t have a term for those sorts of people, but I wish we did. Sylvia was one of those.