Getting Here Part XI: You Got to get Down to get Up

Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing psalms. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

Brethren, if anyone among you wanders from the truth, and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins. James 5: 13-20 (NIV)

I stood by the bed saying words I would never have expected to say.

"Maybe we should give church a try again."

I expected an argument and a rejection. Religion was the past long gone.

"Where," she asked in a whisper.
"I don't know? How about that new church down the road?"

Just a few weeks ago this new church opened on the Balckwood-Clementon Road, down the hill from us and just a bit from our street. I knew nothing about it not even which denomination. It looked like many Protestant Churches, steeple on top, big cross on the front.

"Okay," she said.

What was left at this point. We had talked in the hospital and it seemed decided she would have her tubes tied while there. This was the end of the road for that dream, that persistent hope of hers to have a child of our own. I had given that hope up five years ago. Where do you go when you wake up from your dreams and find they are all nightmares?

She had wanted children and a home of her own. This didn't appear to be on the menu of our life. Children were officially an impossibility and although I had a descent job, we had not put anything away in the bank. Remember, we were going to have fun and worry about that later when we got old. 

I wasn't even writing much anymore. My last published paid article was in "Animal Lover's Magazine" a year ago. I had been promoted so-to-speak at Welded Tube. I say so-to-speak because I was still Assistant Controller, but Computer Systems Manager had been added to my duties. Between my added responsibilities, which had me on-call 24/7, and our party-hardy lifestyle there wasn't time to squeeze in any writing.

There was nowhere to go from where we were. Lois was in the deep doldrums of depression and I just didn't have any enthusiasm for anything anymore. Where was any help for us? More sex and more drink, was that the escape from misery? Most my life I was confident in myself to overcome any adversity. I was a loner, who constantly plotted my own course in life. Now I felt like a captain of a boat lost at sea in high waves, a think fog with a broken rudder and a leaky haul. Yeah, it was that bad.

But there was a God. I heard his voice in that baby's heartbeat. I didn't know much about Him, but I felt that maybe church might help in finding out. What was the worse that could happen, more disillusionment? So the next Sunday we went.

We sort of dragged ourselves up the walk that day. I guess we both thought about our past experiences visiting churches, but at the door were a couple of people who smiled and asked us our names. Another man came and handed us a bulletin and led us to a pew halfway down the aisle. It was a compromise. I like to sit down front, Lois prefers the back, so we sat in the middle. Another man came over and introduced himself and welcomed us. No one was glaring at us as if we were interlopers on their private island.

It was then I glanced at the bulletin. At the top was the church name, Laurel Hill Bible Church, which really told me nothing. It was the next line that really caught my eye, "An Independent Fundamentalist Church". 

Whoa, baby, what had I gotten us into? My immediate inclination was to get up and run for the exit, but that would be too embarrassing. We'd just sit and ride it out if somewhat nervously. My idea of a Fundamentalist Church was people rolling down the aisles and kissing snakes. These were going to be a  bunch of Bible-thumping fanatics, brainwashed zombies, pie-in-the-sky freaks.

Although, no one looked very freakish. No one was waving some tract at us. People were just saying good morning and nice to see you and being just plain friendly everyday people.

The Pastor gave a sermon on James 5 that morning. I sat stunned. I sat sweating. I sat feeling he was preaching directly and only to me. I had never felt that way in a church service before in my life. How could this man know so much about me? At the end he gave an alder call, something I learned he always did. No way I was going to walk up to the front. That would have been so humiliating, but when he asked if anyone felt the need for prayer I did raise my shaking hand.

It was on the next September 1975 Tuesday afternoon I went into my little writing den at our apartment. I got down on my knees. I felt like crying. My whole body was quivering. I wasn't certain what to say. When I was 14 and in the Boy Scouts one of my patrol members was also a friend. His name was Jim Dawson and he was pretty religious. He often talked about Jesus during campouts. Once he gave me this card to put in my wallet. It said, "If you were to die tonight where would you be tomorrow?" This was followed by H______. You were supposed to fill in the blank as either Heaven or Hell.  I asked him, "How am I supposed to know that?" I was kind of angry about it.  I told him I thought I was a pretty good guy, so I would hope heaven, but didn't see how you could really know. 

I guess I remembered some of what Jim had said way back then because I stuttered out a pretty disjoined prayer asking God to forgive me and for Jesus to come into my heart.

I'm sure what I said wasn't elegant, but it worked. I knew it the moment I stood up. It would be hard to make someone who hasn't experience it understand how different I felt. I felt lighter. I also soon discovered other changes. Now I wanted to read the Bible. I did still have one about the place. More amazing, when I read it I was understanding it. I knew a lot of the stories, of course, I had been forced to Sunday School and I had seen those Hollywood movies like the Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ( oh yeah, that movie was real Scriptural) and King of Kings. Reading the Bible was a struggle with all those thees and thous, begots and begats and other arcane words that I didn't understand. The Bible had been mostly gobbledygook to me. Now it made sense when I read it. I could understand it, not just the surface stories, but the shades of meaning in every verse.

On the next Sunday, humiliating or not, I walked down the aisle at the alder call.

Now some might discount any real miracle here. I don't see it that way. If God could open my eyes to His Word, then he could do anything. I was to find out that was true in the next few years. What God was to do in Lois and my life was impossible. If nothing else, what was to happen is proof positive of the power of faith in Jesus Christ and the mercy of God.

To be continued...

The song, "Help Me" written by Larry Gatlin of the Gatlin Brothers (partial lyrics below) seemed so apropos to where I once was and how I asked that I have shared it here. The little video is Johnny cash singing it and I think cash captured that voice of the desperate man calling out to God better than anyone.

Oh, lord, Help Me walk
Another mile, just one more mile;
I'm tired of walkin' all alone.

And lord, Help Me to smile
Another smile, just one more smile;
Don't think I can do things on my own.

I never thought I needed help before;
Thought that I could get by - by myself.
But now I know I just can't take it any more.
And with a humble heart, on bended knee,
I'm beggin' You please for help.

"Help Me" by Larry Gatlin


This is Johnny Cash singing Larry Gatlin's song "Help Me, which captures the essence of a broken man turning to God. 

Getting Here Part X: God But A Heartbeat Away

Perhaps the direction of my life in the first half of the 1970s was reflected in my changing look. At the beginning of that decade I had a certain fresh-face look. My hair was trimmed from what it was in our Hippie phase

As I slipped further into a life of pleasure-seeking and anger at those who criticized such living my look darkened. I let my hair grow out again and also stopped shaving.

By 1974 I appeared quite the anarchist.  I was also now in even another job and we had made two more changes of address. Since leaving ARCo in May 1969 I had worked for Philadelphia Gum as a bubblegum welder, North American Publishing Company as circulation manager, Lincoln bank as Operations Accounting Supervisor and Olson Brothers as Office Manager and Cost Accountant.  Now I was a year with Welded Tube Company of America as Assistant Controller.

We had given up our apartment in Aldan because Olson Brothers was planning to relocate in New Jersey. We moved to the Cherry Hill Towers to be closer to the new factory, but then Olson's folded operations instead and I found a new job and we moved to Chalet at Ski Mountain, on the edge of Pine Hill and near Clementon, NJ.

We continued our friendship with the couple from Aldan and so there was little change in our lifestyle. However we ended the visits with the other couple because Lois was suspecting they were hinting we do engage in wife-swapping. Also in those years we lost two more babies in the early months of pregnancy. Lois was having more pronounced periods of depression. I was urging her to have her tubes tied before her health suffered.

We traveled a lot, went to concerts a lot, drank a lot and engaged in risky sexual behavior. Then in 1975 on one of our vacation trips I noticed she was getting sick in the mornings. She finally told me she was pregnant again, number seven.

The doctor was dubious, but did his best. I don't think he performed a Shirodkar procedure again, but can't remember for certain. Lois did have this procedure performed previously because it was determined she had an incompetent cervix, but it proved unsuccessful and that baby was lost. Nonetheless, things were looking okay this time. She made it through the fourth month and was well into the fifth, but then it happened. She told me she felt she was going to lose it and I took her to the hospital.

They put her in a labor room and hooked up an IV drip. They hoped to retard the labor and give the baby time to develop further. She was alone in this room for nearly a week. Every day after work I came and sat with her.

On a table near her bed there was a monitor. It recorded the babies heartbeat. Do you know when a heartbeat is first detectable? In the fourth week of the fetus the heart can be heard. At that point the brain is forming its five sections and all the vital organs have formed. The baby is a human from the moment of fertilization, which is the point when it has all the DNA to determine its makeup and from conception the sex of the baby is known. From that point it is dividing and developing and two weeks after that it has a face.

Much of the time spent in that room there was silence, but not completely. There was the sound of the baby's heartbeat all the time. It sounded strong. It sounded like someone who was fighting very hard to live. 

Near the end of that week the doctors had to allow the labor to proceed and a baby girl was born doomed to die. We would have named her Amy. 

I was sent to a waiting room while that delivery and death took place. I sat in the waiting room and somehow I could still hear that beating heart. I know it is hard for some to understand, but every beat I imagined told me there was a God. Hearing that baby struggling to live made me understand that life could not have been just a chance accident. I didn't know exactly what God was, but I could not do anything at that moment but believe in a creator. 

When we went home, once again just the two of us, it was with a feeling of great emptiness. My wife was as low as I ever saw her. She didn't want to get out of bed. She was crying. She talked of suicide.
I did not know what to do. 

I found myself making a suggestion I never thought I'd make. It would change my life.

To be continued...

The last picture is a fetus at 15 weeks.

Getting Here Part V: Desolation Row

The first few years of our life together went rather smoothly. Both of us were doing well on our jobs. There were promotions and raises. Outside of work we were enjoying something of the good life. Besides eating out regularly, going to dances at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown and plays at the Valley Forge Music Fair we traveled. We went to Gettysburg, toured Virginia and spend several days in New York staying at the Waldorf-Astoria (that is Lois pictured there on the left in 1962).

Also in the year we got married I won runner-up in the Writer's Digest Writing Contest. My desire was to become a self-sustaining author. I spent as much time writing as I could. Typically we would get home from work, have dinner and I would disappear into the den to write for the evening. I would come back down around ten and we would talk (or other things) until the wee hours of the morning. We were young, sleep didn't seem high on our list of things to do.

We could always talk. We talked most of the time on our dates. The other thing we could always do was sex. I was a virgin when we got engaged, but I admit I wasn't when we married. There was no way either of us could restrain ourselves for that whole year. We took any opportunity alone to go at each other. This sometimes had funny results. One time we were at my home and my mother and grandmother left for some church function. My dad was on the road somewhere. We waited until mom's car went down the road and then we began undressing. We just reached the state of au natural when we heard the kitchen door open and my mother coming through the house calling my name. We quickly began pulling on clothes. My mom knocked on my bedroom door and I had to let her in. She said they had forgotten something and then they left again.  At the time Lois wore a pair of leopard spotted pedal-pushers. I turned around with a sign of relief and saw her pants were on inside out.

So when Lois became pregnant two years after we married it was sooner than we wished, but hardly surprising. We were concerned about the financial implications, but these were outweighed by the prospect of parenthood.

In August 1963 Lois was home from work. I am not certain why she didn't go in that day. She was in her fifth month of term. I got a call from her later that morning. She said she was losing the baby and asked me to come home.  I asked if she had called the doctor.

"Yes, " she said, " I told him I was going into labor. He said that was impossible. He would send something from the drugstore for my pain and not to bother him again."

I said, "I'm coming home right away."

I said it, but knew right away was not going to happen. I left work immediately, but I still had to walk to the train station, catch the next train, which might mean up to a half hour wait and ride it for an hour, then drive the last few miles. When I finally walked in she was in our bedroom. I entered and she was shivering on the bed. There was blood.

"I'm sorry," she said and began to cry.

"Where is it?" I asked.

It was in the bathroom in a basin. It was a boy. We would have named him Sean.

I called the doctor and he came. He wasn't happy about coming. He went into the bedroom, was there a few minutes and came out.

"How is she?" I asked.

"She'll be fine," he said.

"What should we do with the baby?" I asked.

He brushed by me. "You can throw in the garbage for all I care," he said and left.

I was stunned. Lois went back to work in a few days, but she came home upset and depressed. Despite her own ordeal no one gave her much sympathy. They were too busy talking about and feeling sorry for Jackie Kennedy, who had just lost a premature baby two days after its birth.

Her depression was understandable, but it was a harboring of something that would increase as the years went by that had no relationship to this loss. It is still not clear if this physical loss was a factor in those that would be loss in the future.

Meanwhile, my life had also changed. A fellow my age had started working in my unit and we became friends. He had been going to Temple University on a football scholarship, but gotten injured and loss his grant. He couldn't afford the tuition, but he was now working during the day and going to college at night. I didn't know such a thing as evening college existed. I thought you had to go to a campus and live in a dorm and spend big bucks to attend university. He suggested I try it.

That summer I enrolled at Temple as a non-matriculating student. I took Introduction to Sociology with plans to major in that field if I though I could handle college. I got straight A's in the course and the professor told me I should definitely enroll that fall. I did, taking as many credit hours as allowed to a part-time student. By September I was working full time, often with overtime, and going to school three nights a week. I still tried to squeeze in writing everyday and keep up my time with Lois.

During this same year Ronald finished his term of service with the Army and moved back to the area. He took an apartment in a nearby town and invited Lois and me to dinner. We had a great evening talking about old times. Toward the end of the evening Ronald told us something which at first we didn't quite understand.  He said he had gone to a club in Philadelphia. The address had been given him by a friend. He didn't think he would go, but he did. There were only men in the club and during the night they danced with each other. He danced, too, and he enjoyed it and thought he would go back. He left it at that. It wasn't until Lo and I discussed this that we grasped what he was telling us.

I refused to believe it at first. When we were double-dating during high school I always thought Ron was the most awkward guy I had seen around girls, but I never thought it more than a deep shyness. Homosexuality was not talked about much in the period I grew up. I knew it existed. Guys at school would call someone they didn't like "queer" as the ultimate insult. The only other information I had was from sleazy magazines were homosexuals were either blackmailed or beaten up. I became concerned for Ronald, fearing these things would happen to him. I wrote him a letter. We had an exchange of letters and I in my naiveté and he in a period of sensitivity mistook what we said to each other and as a result stopped speaking.

At this time I discovered an odd thing. When I would get into a conversation with people at work I would begin to shake. I was all right when discussing business, but if the conversation turned to other things and became serious I felt my body was quivering and that I couldn't control my speech. I decided to do something about it and went to a clinic and met with a psychologist. I didn't tell my parents because they would have had a fit. Psychologists and psychiatrists were people only insane people visited. Anyone who went to one for therapy was stigmatized in their world. But I didn't feel this way. I knew I had to do something before this shaking I felt interfered with my job.

The Psychologist was almost a caricature. He resembled Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H (pictured right), the bushy hair and mustache. He wore jeans with one of those corded sports coats with the leather patches on the elbows. Invariably he would enter, sit down and plop his feet up on his desk. He wore these causal shoes with thick crepe soles. I did most of the talking. He asked if I had any recurring dreams. I said I often dreamt I was being chased by a bull or a gorilla. He said these dreams meant I hated my father. O-o-o-k-a-a-ay? My father and I didn't have the best relationship, but I didn't think I hated him. He really took interest when I mentioned buying several books on homosexuality. I explained about Ronald, my fears of what might happen to him and that I wanted to understand it. He decided my concerns about my long-time best friend indicated I was homosexual. If there was one thing  I knew for sure, I was not a homosexual. I stopped going to the clinic.

Oddly, my feelings of shaking during conversations stopped at that point.

These years, though, continued to be a yo-yo of ups and downs. Lois seemed to revive from her loss of Sean all right, but she was beginning to have some paranoia about the neighbors and an occasional bout of depression or migraine that laid her up. Then one day she came home and said she had been fired.

She said there was office politics going on and some manager were trying to "get her boss" and somehow that resulted in her being terminated. Whatever the reason, we now had a financial problem. Our income was more than cut in half because she was actually making more than I was. We went from having luxuries to not being able to meet our monthly bills. After several months we decided we had to sell the house.

We put the house up. There was a real estate slump at the time. Worse, we came under physical threat. A neighbor saw an African-American couple visit the house and the next thing we had a delagation of our "friendly" neighbors threatening to break all the windows in our house if we dared consider selling to a black person. I told our realtor we would sell to anyone who wanted to buy the place. This did not exactly ease the tension, but maybe it sped up the sale. The realtor suddenly found a white couple who purchased the house almost immediately after this confrontation. We sold at a slight loss.

We moved in with my father-in-law, possibly one of the biggest mistakes of my life, but we were naive and didn't know what else to do at the time. It was to be one more address on our journey down Desolation Row.

TO BE CONTINUED...