He called me!

1981. The year of Crazy Faye, our new roommate. Eventually, they kicked her out, but only after she staged her own stalker episodes and blew off the "social" rules of the school in a few other ways. Since there were no locks on our room doors (only on the building's main doors, and only the floor leaders and dorm supervisors had keys), my roommate and I got a little nervous about messages scrawled in lipstick on the mirror and notes and weird packages arriving with a knock at the door and no one there. Although I'm not really sure why, my roommate lost more sleep about it than I did, but still. It was weird.

And it got into my letters to my new friend, Impossibly Smart David.

* * * * *

He had my address. I'd made sure of that. But I did not have his, and besides - I was the girl. He could write or not write, but I was not going to write first. The girl can't write first!

(Would he actually do it? I practically forced my address on him, there at the last minute. I mean, it seemed like he wanted it. It seemed like he just wasn't asking, but he was really happy when I said something. That's what it seemed like. Maybe he would just forget about it. He was so much smarter and so much better educated than I was. Maybe he would get busy in grad school and just forget about letters to the odd girl he'd met over the summer.)

I got his first letter a couple of weeks into the school year. It was only four or five pages long. He thought I was smarter than I thought I was, but - well - I'm nothing if not up for a challenge, and so I tried to keep up. Besides, tyger's fearful symmetry or no, it was apparent that he was in a bit of a crisis. His conversion during the spring before we met (a re-conversion, really - his family had been Methodist) had shaken him deeply. He needed a friend. Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Yes. I do. I know who made me. That, I can talk about. Our letters grew longer, and more frequent.

He wrote about his functional premises and working paradigms seeming to him like books, but books apparently and very inconveniently stacked on top of each other. His inner library was once assembled and arranged, but now every time he went looking for something, the thing he needed was invariably on the bottom of the stack. This inner rearrangement of his world had pitched him into painstaking periods of deliberate inner work, and to do it, he wrote pages and pages of letters to me. Every time I opened another of those fat, plain envelopes - ordinary letter envelopes with my name and the school's address written in blue ink in his grad-school note-taking scrawl - I felt the heady rush of the subtle compliment he paid me. Every time I read one of those ten- or twelve-pagers, I felt a bit like a kid, running to keep up - just glad to be invited along.

And just like a kid running alongside, I tended to prattle on in my answers. I mean, I answered his points. I think I did. I tried to answer him. I wanted to reason and wrestle those enormous ideas with him, and to make some sort of intelligent reply.

But I also described my life in Pensacola, land of sand and pines, daily room check and monthly Artist Series -- in which we all dressed up in formal wear (checked and approved for modesty) , and then walked, sometimes ankle deep in flows of the rainwater that never soaked into the ground properly, or meandered in less splashy weather, across the campus and down the street to the high school gym where we sat on metal folding chairs facing the stage, for the artist of the month. (Theatrical monologues and sopranos and pianists, yes. Bare shoulders, microphones, or dancing, no.) Some of us had dates for these gatherings. All of us tried to ignore the chaperones stationed along the paths and sidewalks. The chaperones did not like to be distracted by conversation. They need to be watching for things happening behind the enormous golf umbrellas - the only umbrellas large enough to cover a dating couple without that couple coming into contact with each other.

Attendance at Artist Series is mandatory, and the dorms are locked behind you, but at performance events, nobody has an assigned seat. At dinner and at daily chapel, in every class and every night for lights out, there is someone checking to make sure you are where you have been assigned to be, but no one checks your name off a list if you're all dressed up at a dating event. Everyone also gets assigned to a dorm room and one, two or even three roommates. If you have a good enough reputation, you may be allowed to request a roommate. Submit your request before the deadline, please.

My Elf had a good reputation. She also kept track of deadlines. They put me in her room in the middle of my first semester, and we stuck to each other like glue until she graduated at the end of my third year. She was small and fierce and cute and sporty, and she was elected and reelected to student government. Elf was the oldest daughter of a Baptist preacher and she grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, in the land of altar calls and revival meetings. One of the school deans was an old family friend. Elf almost never got any demerits - not even for room check.

I, on the other hand, was tall and thin and bookish. She wore plaid, and I wore soft ruffles and lace collars. She subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated (and even though she was a girl, they still confiscated the annual swimsuit issue when it came). I auditioned for the smaller, more advanced chamber choir and got into it during my first semester. She wouldn't have recognized the alto line of music if it fell on her. And things did fall on her. She used to stand at the open closet, trying to reach things off the upper shelves, and when they were about to come down on her head, she would call me. "Tall person! Tall person!" --- By the time they gave us Crazy Faye for a roommate, Elf and I had a system. Crazy Faye came to our room. She was the one who needed to learn where things go. Elf wasn't keen on things being where they don't go.

Faye didn't start out crazy, as far as we could tell. At first, she was only a bundle of 17-year-old energy who made us laugh a lot. She had "graduated" earlier from her A.C.E. high school than she would have done from a conventional school. Never heard of A.C.E.? Well, back in the day, the Accelerated Christian Education way of doing Christian school was really starting to take off. It was (and is) a workbook method. Do the lessons, take the quiz, get a good enough score, move to the next book.

Such a method might be (almost) educationally sufficient in the hands of some people, but the responsible adult where Crazy Faye had gone to school was apparently not such a person. That girl had graduated a year early (she told us she got really fast with the workbooks), with honors, and had come to college intending to catch herself an upperclassman and marry him. At seventeen. To marry, at seventeen. I suppose her beauty pageant titles had given her the idea that she was qualified to carry out this plan, but her lack of ability to calm down and get her course work done made it a little difficult to fit in as a student. As the semester wore on, the crazy started up. Poor kid. She should never have been there in the first place.

Crazy Faye was the reason David called me at school for the first time.

Right Man, Right Woman

Probably, there were not many of us so tied up in knots over this as I was. Probably, most of the students who went through Mr. Nielson's eighth grade don't even remember the series he did on "Right Man, Right Woman." (Probably even fewer students know that he was a Bob Jones grad, or care.) But me? Well, I took it seriously.

Right before my fourteenth birthday, in the year when my sister had her first baby and I took to riding my shiny white and blue 10-speed as often as I could, all the way to where they lived in The Duplex (so called in our family, as if there were only just that one duplex in the world) ... in the year immediately before everyone in our high school group at church and our teachers at our Christian school and the counselors at camp and all of my peers became obsessed with our "dating standards" (not banners we carried, not any sort of minimum requirements for potential dates, but how much we would be willing to "do physically" while on a date) ... the very first teacher on the topic was Mr. Nielson.

I took copious notes. He passed out reams of ditto machine copies of instructions and Bible verses and concepts and warnings. God, he told us, intended for each of us to get married. Further, God had one perfectly "right" man for each woman and one perfectly "right" woman for each man. This is in the Bible. This is what God says. This, students, is the most important thing for you to know in your life.

I would like to thank Mr. Nielson for mentioning to us that we would change more in the years between our 18th birthday and our 22nd or 23rd birthday than we would for the rest of our lives. I'm not at all sure that that's true, but I am sure that somewhere between high school and adulthood, a few seismic shifts happen, and it is probably a good idea to wait until after the continents have settled into place before choosing a Mate for Life.

I would also like to flick Mr. Neilson's nose (and the noses of all who followed after him, carrying on the refrains of the chorus he set in motion for us). There were a few omitted and rather important bits of information.

First of all, it is not in the Bible that we are all meant to get married, or that we are all meant to "know" who the Right Man or the Right Woman is by means of some interior process of Finding God's Will for Our Lives. In fact, the notion of falling in love with The Right One is so new to the world that the shine hasn't even worn off of it! Why, it's not even Christian! It's Say Yes to the Dress, and a burgeoning wedding industry ... it's Disney movies and romance novels and the eradication of tribes in favor of individuals in a post-Enlightenment universe of ideals. It's also a little sex-crazed and adolescent. So that's the first thing.

But the second is worse. Way worse. Quick, sharp flicks all 'round for anyone and everyone who ever taught me to look for signs and wonders from the supernatural realm, either in the Bible or in My Heart.

Neither holy writ (from an era of arranged marriages) nor my fiercely romantic heart were ever meant for this sort of job. Holy writ teaches only that the spouse is supposed to love the one you're with (once you've been properly joined in the first place) and is stubbornly silent on the matter of Dating Standards. There's no How To Choose a Mate chapter and verse. There just isn't. And as to My Heart? Well, what if the guy I "feel" is the Right Man happens to be behaving otherwise? What then? Call me vain and full of conceit, but I had more rather more self-esteem than to be grabbing at an escaping man.

The alternative to his trying to get away is, of course, just as problematic. What if he thinks I might be The One, and I know for sure that it would be a disaster? What if he's sure of it? What if he has been praying, and GOD TOLD HIM that I was the one for him? What then?

It would be decades after my own marriage before I got any clarity about any of this. It's possible to get married, stay married, and have a happy life, even if the bride believes with all her being that it is supposed to be a matter of the Right Man and the Right Woman in the Right Marriage. But it sure puts a huge demand on the poor guy who wants that girl. For us, it started with a letter.

* * * * *

A summer of Friday night conversations, and it was time for me to go back to the humidity, hairspray, and assigned dinner table seating in the Gulf Coast. It was time for this interesting intellectual to go back to Seattle to start grad school (getting a Master's Degree in Comparative Lit - whatever that was). Bible studies were over, I had an even deeper certainty about being certain about the Sovereignty of God, and an even stronger determination to find my own Right Man (and a growing suspicion that he was not a student at my school).

We stood at the front door, just as we had on all the other Friday nights, but this time we were trying to delay. All at once I realized that I did not want to stop talking with this man. And, besides, I had a lot of guy friends. My best friends had always been guys. Other guys write to me at school. Some of them had even come to visit me there. So, of course, there's nothing wrong with asking him. Mortifying if he doesn't want to, though. But I don't want to stop this conversation. He'll leave, and our conversation will be over. He doesn't know how to get hold of me there. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't, unless he had my--

"You don't have my school address."

"No, I don't."

"Wait. I'll give it to you."

"Okay."

So I did.

He stayed - We walked - I got lost

Friday, July 10, 1981. The first of the Friday night gatherings. For the next eight weeks, people in their teens and twenties sat on and leaned against couches and chairs in our living room to listen and look things up in their Bibles and ask questions and have a discussion ... and then they moved to the dining room and kitchen and out onto the porch to eat. Games were played (and avoided). Water balloons were dropped (one week, they were dropped from the roof, three stories up). There was laughing and there was the effervescent energy of young people eager to learn - eager to move into a New Thing - eager to be together and be alive.

And then there was me.

This was my chance, you see. After being out of the state, away from all of the New Church energy, not taking the Greek course or participating in the quilting, what I wanted was to get my bearings again.

And then there was her.

She never had a hair out of place, and that's saying something, considering that we'd been through the seventies together. There was a lot of hair on the planet in the 1970's, and hers was never messy. Her clothes were never wrinkled, and her cool brand of calm never ruffled. She'd gone on a couple of dates with my Crime Fighter, and he told me once that they'd almost been in what would have been a horrible car accident, and she said not one word about it. Not in the middle of it, not afterward. Her composure never broke.

And then there was my mother.

She saw me coming downstairs on that first Friday of meetings, jeans and shirt (untucked) ... bare feet. I was dressed for a summer Friday. I was not dressed for success. It was deliberate.

"Wouldn't you be more comfortable if you put on some shoes?"

"Nope."

Not competing with her. She would be coming to the meeting, and she would be completely perfectly absolutely composed - and so ... I would not be.

* * * * *

They came. They gathered. We studied. And there was a tall guy I'd never seen before. (Well, actually, there were several.) We'll call this Bob Jones student the Male Model, because he could have been. Who knows? Maybe he was. He was definitely a Bob Jones student, though. We had a lot in common. We laughed easily and knowingly about the rules at his school and mine. We were both going back. We knew why we were attending schools like that, and we were both going back, and we both thought most of the way they live down there is just silly.

I liked him. His name was David, the Male Model.

But she liked him, too. And their parents approved. My journal is filled with page after page of longing and railing and fussing and complaining because of her. And him. Why wouldn't he ask me out? Why? I liked his sister. We went to a play together and we had a blast. Taming of the Shrew ... set in a Wild West town, complete with Wild West accents. I just couldn't understand it. Why does little miss cool and perfect get the dates? Where's the fun in that?

* * * * *

There is this journal ... and then there is all the stuff I didn't write about. Stuff I remember. Stuff we remember. The walk, for instance. The walk I now get teased about, as if I'd known what I was doing all along.

What's not in my journal is this one small fact.

Each Friday night, when everything was done, when people went home, the David that was Faye and George's nephew didn't go. After a little more time had passed, my parents would go to bed. That David was still in our house. My brothers would give up and go up to their rooms, and that David was still there. Me, him, the vast living room, and questions. He asked them. I'd run out of breath and run out of answer, and he'd ask another one. An hour - maybe two. The summer evening would turn into a summer's night, and eventually I would say good night to him, all by myself ... and then close the front door, and go through the kitchen to the steep back stairs, up and past the second floor, to the sitting room and three bedrooms at the top of the house. My brothers were asleep in the other two. Everything was quiet inside the house, and the sound of an occasional car driving by on the street or a distant siren would waft through the open windows. By the light of my bedside lamp, I wrote and wondered why David the Male Model was so interested in little miss perfect coiffure. I stopped writing and wondered about the interesting new David. He was too confusing to write about, apparently.

But he was interesting to talk to. His questions were interesting. His answers (when I could get them) were even more so. And so, one night in August, to escape the looming game in the hall, and find a place to talk that wouldn't be interrupted, I asked him, "Want to take a walk? We could go up to the park ..."

"Sure!"

Confidently - as if I knew perfectly well where I was going, how to get there, and how to get back, I started off, up the sidewalk toward the park. We talked. I tried not to get caught noticing how tall he was. (Tall is a big thing for me. I'd told my dad years before that I wanted him to find me a man who was as tall as the missionary we had staying with us at the time. "How tall are you?" I asked him. "Six four," he said. "Dad," I said, "find me a guy who's six four." I wanted to be able to wear high heels when I got dressed up and still not be taller than the man I was with.)

We made it to the park, and then we started down again, and all at once I had no idea where I was. It was getting dark. The abundant plant life that's all over the city of Portland was hanging over our sidewalk (what sidewalk was this?) so that we had to walk single file. We'd gone uphill to get there, so I was very much hoping that walking downhill would get us to something I recognized. I thought about how stupid it would sound to admit to being lost a few block from my own house. It was easier to think about than the fact that I was lost with an enormous stranger.

To this day, that David claims that I made this move on purpose - to give him a chance to watch me from behind as we went back down to the house. But, really, he knows better. I still get lost in what ought to be familiar places. And he still knows where we are. The difference now is that I know when he's watching me from behind.

Never the Bride

Beware the honest keeping of a journal. It may show you, thirty years after you have written in it, just how full of holes your memory is. Apparently, I have retained the main points - the chapter headings - like some kind of outline, with all but the largest lines missing. Apparently, I did not turn away from my friends quite so easily as it now seems.

When I came home from college in the summer of '81, no fewer than five weddings were about to happen in my little circle of friends, and at least one of my former classmates was expecting her first baby. I attended these weddings. I dressed up and stood beside the wedding guest books, inviting people to sign them, and I dressed up and sat next to the next bride at her bridal shower, making the ribbon "bouquet" out of the gift ribbons and a paper plate. I dressed up again, and attended another wedding, this time sitting in the pew and vowing not to use "A Problem Like Maria" as a wedding march - especially if the aisle of the church is really short and doesn't allow for the entire theme to be played through. I dressed up and attended another one, and vowed not to use lime green tuxedos if I ever got married, and came home and wrote,

"Two weddings in one day is a bit much for me. (My brother has been singing one line of the Pepsi-Light commercial for the last 10 minutes.)"

Somebody ought to write about what it feels like to attend the weddings of your peers when you, yourself, have nothing but bewilderment and a sense of waiting for something to happen to attend with you as "guest." Oh, wait. People have written about that. There are many utterly forgettable movies and books about this miserable moment in life, and they are all forgettable for the same reason it appears to have taken me about ten more pages to berate myself thoroughly enough to straighten up and move away from a young past into a young future. By the end of June, I made it all the way to,

"I know I belong to somebody already - the only problem is his finding me."

By the first day of July, I wanted to know the identity of this elusive man so that I could,

"...march up to him and shake him by the shoulders and say, 'What on earth is taking you so long?!'"

* * * * *

He didn't take much longer. I didn't have time to realize how ludicrous it was to be at this level of frustration at only twenty-one years old, because he found me at the New Church, when he was visiting with his aunt and uncle that Sunday morning. And I found him right back, at the first meeting of the New Church's summer meetings for the New Study, eagerly diagrammed and charted copied and passed out to the New Group of young people gathered in my parents' New House on Belmont Street. My whole life was becoming entirely new to me. Everything changed on July 10, when I turned my attention to David - the wrong David.

Note to all young women of marriageable age: you'll blush less later if you calm down now.

The Baby White Whale

Well, okay then. If this situation is God's Will for My Life, so be it. The Crime Fighter I'd loved never called. (Smart man. Neither the flurry and expansiveness of a New Church, nor my tenaciously romantic ideas about love really suited him.) The New Church was joyous and easy to love. My brothers were still my brothers, and Portland was still Portland. Friends from high school were there to do things with. And, there was that house. The house helped.

All ten of us had moved into that huge house the year before. When I came home from my freshman year away at school, my older sister, ill at the time, together with her husband and their three little boys, were heaped like five puppies in a box, all of them living in my old bedroom in the house of our childhood. Since my two younger brothers, still in high school, were encamped in their rooms and my parents still in theirs, I spent my nights on a pile of cushions and blankets on the floor in the odd corner room we had always called the "library." And then, few weeks later, we all moved to The Belmont House.

Seventy-two hundred square feet of house. A barn of a place, built for entertaining, back at the turn of the last century. So huge only the two littlest boys needed to share a bedroom. The kitchen still needed to be remodeled, and there was no furniture for the main floor, and so the echoes of ten voices and twenty feet bounced off leaded glass windows and hardwood floors as we passed through, going from our rooms on the second and third floors, past the gargantuan fireplaces and soaring ceilings, on our way to the basement rooms where we ate and had some furniture for sitting on. Such camping out in such a gorgeously built house did not last long. Before I came home for our first Christmas in that house, my mother had found a decorator at Penney's to come and measure the windows for period-appropriate lace, scoured the estate sales and taken furniture to the upholstery school for recovering, and covered the floors with some sound-absorbing oriental rugs. The Belmont House was ready to serve its purpose in the world once more.

I sometimes wonder what conscious memories my nephews have of that time. They were very young, and apparently they felt a bit protective of things in general. Or, at least one of them did.

We called this kid The Baby White Whale -- which is who he had told us he was. It was the reason he needed to make such odd noises and such boisterous splashing in the tub. When he told the ladies in the church nursery that he was a Baby White Whale, they thought he said his name was Baby Willie, and so when my sister came to pick him up, they claimed not to have her child. She did not realize his actual name would be ineffective as a tag that day.

The Penney's decorator, too, was unequal to this kid's formidable imagination. The first time the poor man came to The Belmont House, he knocked on the heavy front door, and when it was opened, found himself looking down onto a stout, impassable little boy, a child refusing to let the man pass through the doorway and into the hall.

"Hello. Is your mother home?"

"No." (She was.)

"Is anyone else at home?"

"No." (They were.)

"No one is home but you?" (He began to be suspicious of this very serious little boy.)

"No."

"Well, who fed you your breakfast today?" (Poor man. He thought he could outsmart a Baby White Whale.)

"Nobody. I haven't eaten anything for eight days." (Had someone been reading stories of the old testament prophets to the kid?)

"You haven't?" (Is something really wrong at this house?) "Where is your mother?"

"I don't have a mother. She died."

No one could ever figure out why my valiant and unarmored nephew had said such a thing to what must have seemed a Goliath of an Interior Decorator, but say it he did, and the decorator went away without speaking to anyone over four feet tall that day. There was nothing left to do but to call my mother on the telephone and try to figure out what was going on. Apparently the man had either showed up at the wrong house or my mother was some kind of evil mistress of an orphanage. Either way, there is no commission in being felled by a slingshot.

* * * * *

A year later, the Baby White Whale, his brothers, and his parents had all moved to a house of their own, and when I came home from school, the Belmont House was properly decorated and already being used for large gatherings of people from the New Church. On a Sunday in June, it was announced in church that there would be a weekly study of the Doctrines of Grace throughout July and August. It was to be a time of fellowship as well, just for the high school and college aged group. It would be held at our house.

That was the Sunday Faye and George's nephew was visiting them. He had come to church with them. He was seated in one of the folding chairs when I walked across the front of the room before the service started, on my way to the piano. He did not say anything to Aunt Faye. She said he didn't need to. She watched him watching me. He says I was wearing a red dress.

A Plume of Ashes

In the grand scheme of things, getting swept into a new church and losing a familiar set of friends ... well, it doesn't exactly rate very high on the list of Life's Great Tragedies. I was plagued by no marauding hoards. There were no barbarians coming over the walls and no lions waiting in the arena. No earthquakes, fire or flood. There was only a pastor back home who had resigned from a church that no longer wanted his old-fashion notions about sticking to the Bible and only to the Bible, and the faithful band of followers who went with him when he left. There was only a church split. That was all.

But for me, that "all" meant, quite simply, everything. I needed my home to be still - to stay where it was when I left it, so that I could return to it, so that I could fly down through the cloud layer and into Portland's airport at the end of each semester and step back into my life, just like I stepped back into my favorite jeans.

Some of the other female students used to pack their jeans and hide them away so they could put them on again in bus stations, highway gas stations, and airports on their way home. I felt no need to do this. I could cheerfully wear a long enough skirt outside the dorm and keep my legs properly clad in pantyhose like a lady ought to do. I could wait until I got home to be comfortable again. Being a student was not hard for me once I got used to college courses, but being away from home was. Chafing at it only made it worse.

The first time I got off the plane in Pensacola, the air was so thick and hot that I nearly burst into tears of panic. Who could breathe that air? A person would need gills to breathe "air" that heavy and hot and wet. There were no mountains. No huge evergreens, either. I missed the Douglas Fir of the Northwest so badly that I used to stand on the walkway outside our nine-story dorm (the tallest building in town at the time), look up, and repeat to myself, "There are trees where are live that are taller than this building. There are trees where I live that are taller than this building."

I kept my mind far from the awareness that my home was at least six hours away by plane and that my nonrefundable tickets wouldn't work at an earlier date in any case. I learned to breathe, and to function in the sticky atmosphere of written and unwritten rules. I stopped brazenly appearing in public without makeup on my face, and I learned to dust our room or clean our bathroom or vacuum our floor adequately and to make my bed in time for the daily room check (and I resigned myself to accept a few demerits for doing it inadequately for the annual White Glove Inspection). I learned not to say what I meant unless I was in a private conversation with personal friends. I adjusted. I wanted my degree, and I could adjust. As long as I knew that the fir trees, and my bluejeans, and my friends and my church and my family were all waiting for me, I could concentrate on what I was trying to do.

The tranquility of the Mount St. Helens region was shattered in the spring of 1980, when the volcano stirred from its long repose, shook, swelled, and exploded back to life. The local people rediscovered that they had an active volcano in their midst, and millions of people in North America were reminded that the active--and potentially dangerous--volcanoes of the United States are not restricted to Alaska and Hawaii.

The national news made the eruption of Mount Saint Helens sound as if all of Portland were about to be submerged in molten lava. From the opposite corner of the continent, I wondered if my family were safe - if the house had felt the tremors - if hot ash had caused my father's car to stall in traffic or set fires as it fell on my friends and family. An "active volcano" cannot be good news. And yet, my mother's voice was perfectly cheerful in our normal weekly phone call. She just went on about my brothers' basketball teams or my nephews and my sister and what was going on with the New Church.

"Mom! What is going on? Are you guys okay? What about the volcano?!"

"The what? Oh! Yes. St. Helens blew up."

"'Blew up'?!"

"Well, it's not that big a deal. There is a lot of ash all over the place, and it is very hard to get rid of. It turns to cement if it gets wet."

"......"

"So, anyway ..."

The mountain blew. The city got coated in ash. Everyone was safe. Everyone but me.

* * *

I came home that summer and saw the second eruption, from where we were driving on a small highway to the coast. I saw my friends and I saw The Empire Strikes Back. I wore bluejeans and I didn't tuck in my shirt. I sent KJ's high school class ring back to him, and my Crime Fighter broke my heart, and I went back to school again in September. I pledged not to use any alcohol or tobacco and swore I had not done so while I was home in the summer, and no, a floor leader did not need to accompany me off campus for my own good. I was confident in my own resistance to those temptations. I had some dates in the dating parlor. I stopped walking down the aisle at the altar calls. I started taking more education courses and began to enjoy school.

And then I came home for Christmas with my friends. The church kicked out the pastor, my friends scattered to the winds, the New Church consumed my family, and under the surface of my wooded slopes, everything began to break apart in my soul.

For the winter and spring of 1981, while I was tucked away in the Independent Baptist section of the Bible Belt, waiting to turn 21 so that I could leave campus without at least one other student, my parents worked joyfully among the faithful band of followers in the New Church. While I studied my chapters and verses in Bible Doctrines 202, my folks wrote to me about the Doctrines of Grace, and T.U.L.I.P., about Calvin and Puritans and Reformers. While I was participating in my second Spring Revival Week, wondering if the Great Evangelist Bill Rice the Third always told that same story about having to shoot his horse, and if he always cried at that same part of the story, my family was learning to sing from an older Presbyterian hymnal and talking about the blessing of Predestination and the proof texts for Limited Atonement.

Inside my modest clothing and behind my better and better grades, the tectonic plates had begun to shift. I used the same Bible I had always used. As I studied it the same way, with the same methods and the same desire to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit as I studied, the last of my private certainties began to send warning ash into the air. Christianity looks different in the Bible Belt than it does in Portland, Oregon. And the Bible, I was discovering, not only looks different being outlined by a quietly studious teacher than it does being brandished by weeping evangelists, but it also looks different being outlined by that same teacher once that teacher discovers the Doctrines of Grace.

The Bible, it turned out, does not explain itself.

And the teachers can be wrong.

Marshmallow Creme and the Crime Fighter

In the summer of 1981, I came home from my second year of college to a life I desperately wanted to recognize and befriend. That was it, really. I wanted the friendliness of my life to come back to me. During the Christmas break of that year, the church that had held the entirety of my social life had shattered, and my friends were blown by the winds of that winter and spring into as many different places as there were friends to fly away. Without them, I did not know who I was.

My friends meant, quite simply, the whole of my world. Varsity Crew, the "college and career age" church group, held our futures. We loved each other. We cheered on the church baseball team, and went out to camp together every summer, and spent countless hours in Bible Study and the intense, unending discussions only the young can sustain. And we were all very young. Young, and earnest, and for all of the girls (and some of the guys), eager to find God's Will For Our Lives, and The Right Man (or Woman) to marry.

Naturally, I assumed God's Will for My Life would include someone from that group. Who else did I know? The previous summer, I'd come home from college with a ring. In Tennessee, where the guy was from, this is how it worked. You really really like a girl, you give her your class ring. You decide you love her, she gets a promise ring with an appropriately microscopic diamond in it. You decide to get married, she gets an engagement ring, and then she gets to pick out bridesmaid dresses and find a use for all those index cards she saved from her Marriage and Family college course as she plans the rest of your life together, starting with the perfect wedding. Coming home with KJ's class ring baffled me as much as it flattered me, and one of the best men in the world saved me from my confusion. He could do that because he was a Crime Fighter.

You know the Crime Fighters, right? They are brave and noble and of great purpose. They stand out there in the cruel, cruel world, and they say, "Use the force, Luke," like Obi Wan, and, "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go," and "Bad dates," like Indiana Jones. Crime Fighters might have love interests from time to time, but basically, a Crime Fighter is a loner through and through. In Varsity Crew, there were some guys who were Crime Fighters, and I loved every one of them. I was pretty sure, in fact, that I could be a good Crime Fighter's Wife.

And so, in that first summer, when I came home with a huge class ring from a high school in Knoxville, I told one of the Crime Fighters about the boy who'd given it to me. I told him that I felt - all the time - I felt like I was being smothered in marshmallow creme with this guy. I told him that I had to be careful not to talk to the guy in language he didn't understand. After I had talked and talked, my Crime Fighter decided to stop me. He decided to fight for me.

"Listen," he said. "I don't really want to talk to you about that guy anymore. I can't be a completely dispassionate observer." (Oh really? Why not? The split second's thought flitted in, and roosted contentedly in my heart. Are you God's Will For My Life, Crime Fighter?) "You can't wake up every day for the rest of your life and pretend to be stupider than you are," he said. "You just can't."

I sent back the ring.

I turned my attention to the Crime Fighter. That summer, I was a Crime Fighter's girlfriend. For about two weeks - in August, I think - we were a couple. My sister thought we were made for each other. Varsity Crew wondered if another two of us were about to pair off, and move off in a flurry of lace and tulle, sung into the Young Couples Sunday School group with a wedding song, lighting a new life together with a Unity Candle. And then, all at once, he stopped the whole thing.

We'd been to church together, and he was driving me home. Instead of going to my house, he parked at the edges of the reservoir and turned off the engine. He turned to me, and he took a deep breath, and he did not reach for my hand. And then, in his best Crime Fighter, I'm not joking around, this isn't negotiable voice, he said the words.

"I can't do this."

"What?"

"I can't do this."

"Why not?"

"I just can't."

"I only have three more years of school, and that's not that long. Why can't you wait?" (In someone else's movie, this might have been a question about waiting for sex. In mine, it was a question about all the tulle and lace and the big white Unity Candle.)

"I just can't. I have prayed and prayed about it, and God is not letting me have any peace."

There is no refuting such a statement. That God would be talking directly to my Crime Fighter, I did not question. That the decision had already been made, in close consultation between the Man Who Leads and the Divine Who Directs Him was irrefutable, and I didn't even try.

Instead, with as much bitterness as I felt, I spat out, "Fine."

I could sense him bracing himself, across the front seat, where he sat. Frozen. Completely still.

Without wondering if I were being horrid -- no, hoping I was being horrid, I continued, "I waited this long for someone to hold my hand. I guess I can wait a little longer."

He looked as slapped as I'd hoped. How could he do this to me? How could he be such a good and honest friend, and then start to hold my hand? To hug me just a little bit longer each time? To let everyone else in Varsity Crew know I was a Crime Fighter's girl, and then tell me now that God wouldn't let him be happy about it?

"Take me home."

He did.

And a year later, when I came home from my second year of college, without anyone else's class ring and entering into a new church family, I wondered where my Crime Fighter was now. I wanted him to call me.

It was in the summertime

Really, we met because I felt compelled to rescue him from a disagreeable conversation. After all, it was my parents' house. The Bible Study was over, and people were scattered all around, and he was stuck on the couch at the far end of the huge living room, listening to those two brothers. It was a hostessing thing. I had to rescue him.

We met because I rescued him. We fell in love because we both hate party games, and my parents are irrepressible game organizers. It was the first meeting for the summer. Games were inevitable. So, as all the "high school and college age young adults" began to obediently arrange themselves in the circle of chairs in the entry hall, laughing at my mom's cajoling, keeping their eyes on the ball she was holding ("pass it with your feet around the circle"), my future husband and I knew in one silent glance that what we really wanted was to continue our first meeting outside on the porch. We met because he will listen patiently to anyone. Because he's nice that way. We fell in love because we wanted to take our own interesting conversation away from the party ... and we still do.

Thirty years after that first summer, twenty-eight years into a marriage, this is our love story.