Romantic Love, Hard Times, A Nice Dinner, A Night Drive, & Angry Shouting

The old man (he’s about my age) who runs the news stand approached our table as Ginny and I ate breakfast at Dave’s Diner. He said, “You two always look so happy. Every time I see you you’re always holding hands and acting lovey-dovey. What’s she do, hit you if you’re not nice to her?”

He’d noticed that we treat eachother with courtesy and that we often talk absorbed with our heads together “like honeymooners or something”.

Nicole, one of the waitresses at Dave’s, gave us a cute Valentine card. She didn’t feel the printed message was appropriate for us so she had erased it and amended the saying. She called us “lovebirds”. She often calls us that.

Lovebirds?

We are unconscious of our behavior; we just do what’s normal to us.

Being in love is normal.

But later on, after a trip to the library, as we sat on a cement wall in the park in the drizzling rain talking and smoking, we asked eachother, “How did we ever make it this far”?

As we drove downtown, Ginny played a Kingston Trio DVD and we sang “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” along with the trio—music from our youth. So in the park, we talked about the ‘60s music and culture—which mostly went over our heads in those days because we were busy making a living, falling in love, witnessing for Christ, starting our family, deciding what to do with the rest of our lives. Mostly in the ‘60s (and since) we lived oblivious to the world swirling around us.

But as we talked about the early days of our marriage back when we were poor, and especially about raising our children. We questioned how we ever managed.

Ginny said we had two things going for us: the grace of God and ignorance.

We survived because the Lord let us survive and because we didn’t know any better.

We were too naïve to give up.

Looking back, I wonder why we didn’t.

When our children were small, one month I earned a total of $7 cash money; the next month things improved, I earned $32.

Bad times.

In those days I worked all sorts of jobs—delivering fuel oil, mowing lawns, flipping burgers, digging graves, cleaning toilets, mopping floors, killing bugs, writing magazine articles, tending dying patients—but however hard I worked, I never earned enough.

For months we lived without electricity or running water. Late at night I’d sneak down to Panama Park with empty plastic milk jugs and draw water from a stand pipe there. We heated our home with wood but having no car at the time I’d scrounge branches and boards along the highway and carry them home on my back. But we kept our children clean and warm and safe and dry and fed (Although on several occasions I stole food—that was a matter of vanity and pride because I did know people who would have given us food had I begged, but I was too vain to ask).

Thank God, we made it—ER, can you thank God for being able to steal food?—Anyhow, I did it and we made it.

But life was tough. It pressed Ginny and me together because all we had was eachother and that made all worthwhile.

We lived in HUD housing and drew food stamps but those were never enough. I recall once Ginny and I got up at 3 a.m. and collected beer cans along the road and at a baseball field to turn in to the recycling plant to get cash to buy the kids breakfast when they got up that same morning.

Back in the 1730s, Susannah Wesley, mother of the founder of the Methodist denomination, lived in grinding poverty with her houseful of children. She praised the Lord Christ for helping her make it.

This dedicated Christian lady once said, “I never did want for bread. But then, I had so much care to get it before it was eaten, and to pay for it after, it has often made it very unpleasant to me. And I think to have bread on such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.”

I understand where she was coming from.

Jesus brings us through—but not without pain and damage.

For instance, I vividly remember having an abscessed tooth and not having money to go to a dentist so I boiled a pair of pliers and pulled out my own tooth myself.

My loving Lord enabled me, but I’m not likely to ever forget that.

I remember once having no money but one single quarter. I tried to use it to make a phone call to an editor who owed me money for a magazine article I wrote—and the pay phone swallowed my quarter and would not give it back.

Bad times.

Once a preacher rebuked us saying, “You two have a siege mentality” and Ginny told him, “That’s because we live under siege”.

We developed an “us against them” attitude. The two of us hung together finding joy in our friendship, fellowship and love.

But by the grace of God we got the kids (our own four, my teenaged son from my former marriage, and several neighborhood kids who practically lived at our house because their own families were in worse shape than ours) we got the kids grown, graduated from high school, then—with many student loans—the ones who wanted to got through college. Then Ginny went back to college and completed her own education.

Our grown children now prosper with good jobs, professional careers, families, and taxes of their own. They tell me they led a happy childhood with may fond memories.

Amazing!

We flourished in those bad times because of God’s grace—and because of our own ignorance. Ginny and I didn’t have sense enough to give up. We didn’t know any better than to keep on going, to try this and try that and endure.

Those hard times bonded us. It was us against the world. All we had was eachother and we clung tight. We learned how to value eachother, to comfort, to love. Damn right we still hold hands, I’m scared to let go.

Ginny is the best thing that ever happened to me in my whole life.

The highpoint of my life was finding her sitting on a curb waiting for me and I realized that this beautiful woman actually wanted to be with me.

Were anyone to ever write the story of my life, it would be a love story.

Talk about the grace of God!

That’s what we did yesterday sitting on the concrete wall ignoring the drizzle of rain—we talked about the grace of God.

In the evening Ginny and I were invited to dinner far out in the wilds of Southside with two young couples, Mike & Laurel and their daughter Anna; Jason & Colette, and their two children (whose names I never heard or have forgotten already). It felt refreshing to be around thriving young families.

Laurel cooked delicious casseroles and Anna baked an almond pound cake served with chocolate-covered strawberries and bananas for desert.

It felt strange to listen in on the conversations and concerns of the young. The guys talked about guns, work, boats, motorcycles, investments and far-off pension plans (“In only 22 years I can retire”). The young ladies talked about magnet schools, commutes, politics, French, and philology. The kids played Trivia Pursuit and showed off Webkin animals.

These three kids appear incredibly bright. Even the 18-month-old baby shines with intelligence and motor dexterity. She has better balance than I do—My arthritis pained me fierce and I shook and wobbled something awful; but nothing wrong with me that the resurrection won’t fix.

Anyhow, I marveled at how the baby figured out how to unscrew the lid from her bottle—she figured out how to do it by watching her mother, but she just lacked the strength to get it off her self Very focused.

And Anna, who is in the fourth grade, showed me an essay she wrote which is better plotted than I can do; it’s about a scavenger hunt. And she told me about using Power Point software on her computer to prepare illustrated talks at school… Power Point! I can barely cut and paste.

Jason and Colette (we were meeting them for the first time) had read my book A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad and had nice things to say which gave me a lift. Jason remarked, “I liked the jokes; she was interested in that religious stuff”.

That pleased me. Proves that book does what I want it to do.

Time to drive home.

The plot thickens:

It was a dark and stormy night…

Ginny avoids driving on Interstate 95; I avoid driving at night. She is almost deaf, I have trouble seeing at night. It was raining and glare reflected from headlights on wet, unfamiliar roads.

Lost in the dark wilds of Southside, a section of town we seldom visit.

“Turn right,” I said.

She must not have heard me and drove straight through that first intersection.

“Go west,” I said.

“It’s east,” she said.

“Now, go straight,” I said.

“What’s that road sign,” she said.

“Turn left at the…”

See where this is going?

We circled some closed, dark office building with an unmarked batch of streets lacing the area and we started blaming eachother for our confusion.

I may have said something about being married to this left-handed, wrong-headed woman. She may have vigorously offered to let me drive my own damn self.

Louder and louder, we discussed our directions.

Aggravated

Frustrated.

Confused.

Tired.

Lost.

We grew angry and yelled at eachother.

Did this argument signal the disintegration of our 40-year love affair?

No. It merely proved that we were tired human beings, both trying to get to the same place, home, each of us with our own abilities and disabilities. Each of us with our own idea of how to get to where we wanted to go.

Finally, although I was right and she was wrong (the management may disagree with the foregoing statement) … well, let’s leave it there.

Anyhow, by the grace of God and through ignorance, we finally stumbled by chance across a recognizable road—far from where we thought we were—and eventually we wound our way home in fuming silence.

In spite of what the ‘60s Beatles song said and what many Christians say today, love is not the answer.

Sometimes shutting your mouth and letting her drive is the answer.

Are Ginny and I still in love despite the tension, anger and shouting of that dark and rainy drive?

Yes, we’re still in love—but I wouldn’t push it right this very moment.