Getting Here Part IV: All-American Dream Couple

When I graduated high school most of my friends went their separate ways, except for Ronald. I had met Ronald in third grade, who became one of my few friends back in that town and he had remained so even when I moved away again. Through those years we had often double-dated, including my Senior Prom when he helped me take both my girlfriends by pretending one was his. (Okay, that's another story.) Now we sometimes searched for jobs together. (Ronald is on the right in the photo. He was 6 foot 4 in case your wondering.)

I don't think either of us graduated with great prospects. My parents had told me to forget college when I entered ninth grade. They didn't understand why I took Academic, since that was college preparatory. Part of their reasoning was financial, I suppose, but they really didn't believe in higher education, unless you planned to be a doctor. My mother constantly worried because I read a lot. Reading all those books would damage my brain, she once told me. Ronald's parents had also told him to forget college.

Ronald decided early on to join the Navy. This changed by accident to the Army later. He wanted me to join with him on the "Buddy System", but again  not being 21 interfered. My parents, especially my mom, were dead set against my joining the service and wouldn't sign the papers. (At 18 I was still considered a minor in those days.)

Ronald hit a snag at his physical requiring surgery before he would be accepted. His surgery resulted in complications that almost killed him.  He eventually recovered and did join the Army. Meanwhile I went to IBM School in Philadelphia.

I had been studying Commercial Art through a correspondence course since my Junior Year. I had talked my mother into this and she paid for it on the promise we never tell my father. My dad took a dim view of both my writing and my drawing. So why did they loosen up and allow me to go to IBM School? It was because this involved running machines. To them running machines was real work; writing, art and that stuff you learned in college was not.


Florence Utt IBM School was a six week course in programming, wiring and operating everything from a 024 Keypunch to a 604 Calculator and a lot of three digit numbers in-between. I graduated at the top of the class.

This accomplishment did not get me a job. I eventually landed a position as a Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting with the Atlantic Refining Company (Later known as Atlantic-Richfield or ARCo). Why is this important in this series of my becoming a Christian? It is because it set up the next phase of my life and the events that led to that conclusion.

Not long after I began my job I began dating this little red-haired Irish lass who worked on the same floor. (When I say little, I am not talking figuratively. Pat [pictured left] was four foot ten and that may have been with heels.)  Despite this height difference, I was six foot, we seemed compatible in every other way, although there was one I overlooked as unimportant. She was Roman Catholic.

One morning I came to work and she stopped me in the hallway. She told me she couldn't see me anymore. Her parents forbade her because I wasn't Catholic. I was angry. Why should that matter, I was still "Christian". "It wasn't any of her parent's business", I told her.

She ran into the ladies' room.

A few seconds later this tall dark-haired Irish lass came out of the ladies room and approached me. (This girl was a foot taller than Pat at five foot ten.) "What's wrong with Pat," she asked me. "She's in there crying her eyes out." This girl also worked on the same floor, the sixteenth, and she always said hello to me when we passed in the hall. I always said hello back, but I was shy and a low talker and she never heard me. She told me later that she thought I was the most stuck-up guy on Earth. Her name was Lois. (Pictured right. She was only one-quarter Irish. She was two-quarters German and one-quarter Native America - Creek.) Her family was Lutheran.

None of that particularly mattered to me. She had been kind and she was good-looking and so whether that day or the next I forget, I went down the elevator with her and walked along down Broad Street. At her subway stop, just before she entered the turnstile I asked her to go out next Saturday. I figured if she said no then she would go through to the platform and I'd continue on to the train station and there would be no period of awkward embarrassing silence.

She was coming out of a rough period. Her mother and best friend both died around the time she graduated high school. She was, like me, an only child and there were some similarities in our childhood. She had been forced to go church and didn't want to and her father was constantly ridiculing her, saying she walked like an elephant or she was homely (which she wasn't and in fact had been a teenage model, left). He also told her she couldn't go to college, because college was a waste of time for girls. They only went to find a guy anyway. (She went on her own to Peirce College and earned her Associates.) Her parents were more restrictive than mine. Appearance was very important to them and she not only had to go to church and be in the proper clubs, but was constantly warned about behaviors that might reflect badly on her parents, drinking, sex, etc. This probably was part of reason she began smoking at age twelve.

We went out that Saturday night and yadda-yadda-yadda just before we got married we bought a house.

However dysfunctional our growing up we meshed well as a couple. As adults we were the All-American Dream Couple. (Well, almost adults anyway. One hitch came up at settlement on the house when everyone discovered we were just a couple of teenagers not yet legal age. But it got resolved and we got the house.)

How many people from basically lower-middle class blue-collar families had the start we did?  We entered marriage with a new car (Studebaker Lark) and a new house (four-bedroom Cape Cod atop a hill with a great view of The Great Valley). We both had jobs that paid above average for those days, even if we were in low level positions. Together our salaries not only met our mortgage and expenses, but afford us the pleasures of eating out weekly at good restaurants and yearly vacation trips. I even had it mapped out how much money we'd have in the bank when we turned thirty.

The house was halfway between our families, so there would be no jealousy that we favored one over the other. More important to us was the distance was enough there'd be no regular pop-ins by either side either. And once married no one was going to make us go to church. Church ended when we walked up the aisle after saying our I dos. (Photo on left: Our first Christmas in our first home together, December 1961. We were both 20 years-old.)

Life was great, what more could one want? What could possibly go wrong?


TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here: Part 1 - Making of a Loner

This is the first of a malt-part series on how God found me and made me believe. I know it is material I've presented several times previously in different ways, but it doesn't hurt to tell the tale again for those who may be new to me. It doesn't hurt to retell for those who may have forgotten and put it out of mind, which could even include myself at times.

I thought it wise to tell how I first got lost, how I found myself in an empty black hole and how God rescued me.

Part 1: Making of a Loner
Part 2: Losing My Religion
Part 3: On the Obverse
Part 4: All-American Dream Couple
Part 5: Desolation Row
Part 6: Change is Blowin' in the Wind
Part 7: Hippie Writer
Part 8: Peep Show into my Soul
Part 9: Atheism Has No Holy Days

Part 10: God But a Heartbeat Away

And so we begin at the beginning.

Just before my parents wed, my father lost his job at a scrapyard. They couldn't begin married life together because they were too poor. Each remained living with their parents. In my father's case this meant his mother and two younger brothers. His father had died during his late teens and he had supported the family by joining Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp.

My father was a high school dropout and rapscallion as a boy, not the best credentials for entering adult life. Now wishing to live with his wife, he was forced to beg a home from his grandfather and namesake, who held the sins of his parents against him. His grandparents all but disowned him and berated and insulted him through his youth. But his grandfather, who owned most property about the town of Modena, did allow him to rent a bug-infested apartment next to the train tracks. This became my first home.

It didn't remain so for long because of that bug infestation. My parents rescued me from the insects nightly dinner plate (my crib) to the country climes of Whitford, moving in with my maternal grandparents, who rented an old house (pictured left) on the estate of George Thomas III, a prominent member of Chester County's founding families. This had been my mother's childhood home. It was not to become mine.

In December of 1941, for reasons I have never learned and probably never will, we moved again,   grandparents, parents, Nellie my mother's dog and me, to Downingtown. The picture atop this page is me, age 3, sitting on the front steps of the new home my grandfather rented for us. My grandfather was a carpenter and eventually repaired that floor. By the time of this picture my father was in the South Pacific fighting the Japanese.

From all accounts, I was a happy, outgoing, friendly, trusting lad then. I always looked so in my earliest photographs prior to 1947.

An event occurred at the beginning of that year that was to change the child I was into something different. After 1947 I would become an often unhappy, withdrawn, socially awkward, suspicious, but self-dependent boy. In the prior year my dad returned from the war and eventually got a job as a long-distant truck driver. He had been away for two years and now he was seldom home during the week. Our relationship grew as distant as his weekly delivery destinations. But even more affecting upon me was he moved us into the swamp house (pictured right).

He got it rent free from his employer and because he was a returning vet. It was in the country, removed from nearly everything and everybody I knew. It sat down a long lane partially surrounded by a marsh. Behind was a cornfield and to the other side a cow meadow. The nearest neighbors were a mile up the highway and none had children near my age. My father was on the road all week and my mother didn't drive. It was desolate isolation.

It is not completely true there were no children my age. There were three boys, brothers, one a year older, one a year younger and one just right. But I only knew them the one summer. Their father was killed in the war and they attended the boarding school in Hershey three-quarters of the year. In that summer we became "best" friends, playing cowboys at each other's place. They had a sister. She was the youngest, about four. I witnessed her death on the highway, going with her brothers from my place to hers on the last day of summer. The boys went back to Hershey and I never saw them again.

We lived in the swamp for two years, until my dad changed jobs again and we lost the house. I wasn't unhappy living there. For a child with my imagination and curiosity it was almost a Garden of Eden. There was so much to explore and the close changes of environment, swamp here, open meadow there, a sledding field behind, a woods in walking distance, made for great adventure in my imagination.

And I was free from many restrictions other kids had. Traffic was no concern as long as I stayed away from the highway. There were few rules imposed upon me. I explored at will. I was generally left to my own devices, entertaining myself by inventing games and stories. I grew very self-sufficient.

I wasn't completely cutoff from civilization. I went to school, of course, to a school I remember nothing about as an adult. It has been erased from my memory for some reason. School apparently was not the center of my life at the time. I also was shucked off to my grandparents on weekends when my dad came home. I would be dropped off Friday night and taken home Sunday evening after dinner. Obviously an arrangement that did little to bring me and my father together.

I spend many of those weekends in the company of my grandfather (pictured left), who I loved dearly. He was the father and man figure in my life. He was a gruff man, well-known about the town and well-liked. His delights were cigars, whiskey, chewing tobacco, fox hunting, boxing matches and telling the occasional dirty joke. He had an admirable vocabulary of cusses as well. He took me on many a fox hunt and to the dives and dingy bars that dotted the county. Probably if I actually didn't spend most of my youngster days in the company of the womenfolk I would have glommed onto his habits, but despite my affection for the man, his delights did not become my own. He died from the ravages of alcoholism with I was sixteen.

At the beginning of 1950 we moved back to Downingtown, back in with my grandparents at first. I was back on the old block and in the school where I had begun first grade. I was now in third grade with the same children I knew then, some of whom lived on that same block and were once my closest friends. Everything seemed the same, but that was an illusion. I was different.

Living in the swamp I had learned to be alone. Back in town it didn't take my contemporaries long to show as far as they were concerned that was all I was and should be, a Loner.

Tears

It is a little more than two weeks past six months since my life was no longer mine. On April Fools my mother was struck down by a moment eruption of a tiny vain deep in the brain. 

The call came early. My mother never called me in the morning. But the voice on the other end was not my mother, but my father and my father never called. “Your mother had a stroke,” he said. This was not the script we wrote. The call that had been expected since his heart attack a couple years back would be of his passing, not one of my mother’s failing. He was supposedly the weak one and she the caretaker. And now I was the caretaker of both by some odd reversal of nature. It never should be that the child becomes parent to the parents.

These six months have been ones of suffering for them, who lived so long, perhaps beyond a reasonable age. But the will to keep on keeping on is strong within us, even when our bodies have begun to desert our souls and hope is only that the suffering might end.

The world that surrounds us can be sympathetic, but is inefficient and slow moving. The gears of bureaucracy move slower than the fingers of beckoning death. And while you wait for these instruments of government and care to turn and click on you see all the trappings of their lives dissolve away, until finally and mercifully they too slip off in the night

BRIDE

She comes all winter warmth
Swathed in clinging frost
And diaphanous gloom.
Her smile of frozen teeth
And her eyes of icy ponds
Send shivers through the room.

We think of death as skeletal,
Cowled with cloak of black
Hunched like some old farmer
Over his scythe and sack
To cut and carry us to our doom,
But no, death is not the groom.

Death comes dressed in marriage veil,
In a snow white bridal gown
With a long icicle train.
Our final vows are sealed by one
Who doesn’t steal, but stills our heart
With a lover’s kiss that ends all pain.

On September 23 my mother felt that kiss and her soul went to The Father, shedding the ravaged body and leaving dad alone.

He wanted to be there to the end, holding her hand as he had for those days before, telling her he loved her so she knew as if she didn’t all ready. But fate and failing lungs carried him from her in the end and he could not be there then. I held her hand that afternoon and told her everything on earth was done and in place and she should not worry anymore and said goodnight. And on that good night she died within the quarter hour before the clock struck eleven.

And he came back to the room they shared during the week after he found her gone and he was too frail to attend at her final resting, to see her body off, to gather up like flowers the regrets and love of long time friends and relatives.

This past Monday dad seemed strong as if he would continue on for many more days and months. Then yesterday all that changed into a gurgle in his throat and a weakness in his body. I could hardly believe it was the same man I had sat next to in the day room the other day as I stood with my wife beside his bed today. He seemed to have shrunk, his breath a gasp and rattle, his eyes wandering up as if seeking escape. He tried to talk, but I could not understand what he was trying to say. He was grasping at the cover over him and I did not know what he was reaching for.

Then at one point as I leaned over trying to hear I did hear what may have been his last distinct words. He said, “Thank you,” which were words my father never seemed to find in his vocabulary before. 

And last evening, October 11, 2012 my father died within the quarter hour before 11:00, within the same time as his wife, the love of his life, the woman they told me he was reaching out for yesterday, had passed. She called for him and he went.

It has been just over six months and in all that time I didn’t cry. There was too much to do for tears. It is 3:38 AM on the 12th of October and now the tears have been coming, in bursts and fits and waterfalls all the last few hours. Now the six months of tears have burst through the dam and flood me.

All is gone now. Willy and Milly have passed beyond the scope of this world. Their house is sold, now the possession of another. All their worldly goods are gone as well. There is nothing left of them except the memories and the feelings they left with others. That is enough, is it not? 

This ordeal has drawn me closer to The Lord and it has taught me many things. Three weeks ago I prayed intently about these things and these passings were God’s mercy both to my parents and to me. 

Take from my parents whatever they left within your hearts, but also see the truth of where our treasure must be for as Job said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”

WHERE THE RAINBOWS END

We begin this journey of life

Down a road we do not yet know.

We see the blossoms of the moment,

Costumed in dancing colors

That entice us like the bees,

To their perfumed petal traps

And we lust to gain their beauty,

 To glisten like the rose after a rain.

We watch the sun rise upon the distance city,

Turning the towers of glass to gold,

Shimmering like a river of riches

And our eyes serve us our breakfast of “wants”

Sprinkled with the sweet sugar of excess.

We glutton for the fat of the land.

Our stressed hearts beat faster

As the grasp of our hands

Fills our veins with the empty

Calories of success.

We ignore the storms of warning

That dare darken our skies and the path

To our ever bigger car and grander house.

We fill our rooms with knick-knacks

To gorge our obese egos

And we ignore the dust specks of reality

That swirls about the air to settle

Lightly upon our treasures

As if in echo of some ancient tome.

Not Home Sweet Home,

But ashes to ashes and

Dust to dust.

We do not see the light for the shimmer.

Our eyes are always to the rainbow,

An illusion of sun and water,

A trick of diffusion

And a lure to delusion.

We cannot own the colors,

But can we the Pot of Gold at its end?

But where the rainbow ends

Lies the mire of despair and truth.

When we reach the distance touchdown point

The rainbow fades away

With all we ever gathered

And we are left naked before the eyes of God.

To My Mom 1920 - 2012

My mother suffered a stroke on April 1, 2012. Before that day she had been independent, albeit sometimes using a cane. She was caretaker to my dad. The stroke was in the Pons area of her brain stem. It took away the use of her left hand and left leg and led to a feeding tube inserted in her side. So she loss her ability to walk and eat, and to do much handling of things. The speech was unaffected.

Her mind was clear and focused until the end. During the last few days when she was actively dying this brought even the experiences Hospice nurses to tears. One told me this was the darkest thing because my mother was aware and responsive to everything going on and most people by that stage were not.

My father sat beside her bed holding her hand those last few days. On Sunday morning he had a build up of fluid in his lungs and they took him to the hospital.

I sat with her Sunday afternoon and held her hand. I told her not to worry about anything. All was taken care of and under control. I told her I loved her and bid her goodnight.

She died at approximately 10:45 Sunday evening September 23, 2012.

Dad holding mom's hand the day before the end.

I want to tell a story and a last lesson my mother taught me about what we should value.

My mother was born in 1920 and her growing up was not in a home her parents owned. There was a prominent family named Thomas, one of the founding families of the Quaker Track in Chester County, Pennsylvania called Whiteland. My mother’s family was tenants on George Thomas III’s estate “Whitford”, in an old white house back of a pond. The “big house” she called it. There was a Blacksmith Shop down the lane from them. That smithy was still working when I was a boy.

She was nine when the Great Depression began and it lasted until she was a grown woman. The family had some hard times. My mother said one of her fondest memories of childhood was every Christmas Mr. Thomas would come to the house and give her a new pair of gloves.

Her dad pulled weeds for a dollar a day. The average America salary was $26 a week, he was making five or six. Her mother became a maid for the wealthier in West Chester and at some point teenage mom labored in the dark of a Mushroom plant, while dreaming of being a motion picture star.

She even entered a talent search for an unknown to play Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind”, but she didn’t win. Somebody named Vivian Leigh got the part. The movie premiered in 1938 and in that year a friend asked mom to go on a moonlight cruise with her, her boyfriend and a friend of his. That’s where she met her Rhett Butler back 74 years ago. He was this tall, wavy haired fellow known as Wild Bill.

He must have thought this little 5 foot one, 98-pound redhead was something, because he’d walk the 15 miles from Modena to Whitford to see her, sometimes sleeping on her porch before walking home again.

Just before they married in 1940 he lost his job and after the wedding they were so poor she went to her home to live and he to his. And so they lived separated the first month of their marriage and except for World War II that was the last time Milly and Willie weren’t together until she left him last Sunday night.

On Monday, when a nice lady from the Hospice went with my daughter and I to the hospital and told dad mom was gone, he quoted Scripture to us. There was once a day when no one would have believed that Wild Bill would ever quote Scripture. It was right after he said, “She was the love of my life and I will miss her.” It was part of a verse from Hebrews. He said, “Well, it says don't it, it’s appointed to every man to die? And now she’s better.”

My daughter, Laurel, and I brought her things home from Pembrooke (the nursing home) that same day, five cartons. Five Cartons was all that was left of what she gathered in her 92 years, mostly clothes, which we donated to Goodwill. All her worldly goods are gone. And it made me think of Matthew 6: 19-20, and made vivid the truth of that Scripture. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”

But she did have some valuable treasures here as well. She had a group of friends, who loved enough to care for her and dad these last years and see them thought when they couldn’t always do for themselves. Thank you and bless you all for loving my mother.

And she had a man who even after 72 years of marriage insisted on sitting by her side all her final days holding her hand.

I spent a few minutes alone with mom on the Wednesday afternoon after she passed. It was a sneak preview just for her son of the girl who once dreamed of being a movie star before her final last staring role on Friday. I told her not to worry; dad would be by her side soon.

And they can enjoy their Heavenly treasures together.

R.I.P. Mom.

What's in a Name; Service and Miracles

Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. Romans 1:28-32

And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:11

No other name but Jesus,

No other name can save,

With Him His peace possessing,

No other good I crave,

'Tis he who heals my sorrow,

And bids my soul rejoice;

And, of, the sweetest music

Is my redeemer's voice.

              by Henry V. Neal

On a Tuesday in September 1975 I had prayed the prayer of salvation. When I got up everything

was different. Oh, not the world around me, but inside me. I knew it at once. It is difficult to explain. You want to say you had to be there, it had to happen to you, then you would understand, and if you have never been there it would be difficult to grasp.

I want to go back to the "Why me?" in the first post of this confessional. I said there were those verses in Romans 1 I thought meant you could go far enough that God left you to your own devices and you had no way back. But I came to realize those verses spoke of mankind in general. Otherwise, why wasn't I lost forever? Hadn't I turned 180 degrees away from God? Hadn't I stopped seeking?

But I wondered, when I declared myself an Atheist and I began arguing with those ministers was it their faith I was trying to destroy or was I trying to find mine? Was I hoping that one of those men would say the thing proving me wrong? 

It doesn't matter, God for whatever reason He had, drew me to Him, even me.

Things happened quickly afterwards. My wife and I became members of that church I said we wouldn't be back to the next week. We were soon involved up to our eyeballs. I found myself doing things I would never have thought it was in me to do, such as cold-call evangelism, being the regional publicity coordinator for a national revival campaign, speaking from the pulpit, understanding passages in the Bible which had never made sense before and in 1976 my wife and I became youth pastors at the church. That is some of the youth group in the picture as we set out to wash car windows at a shopping center. I am standing third from the left wearing sunglasses and my wife is the dark-haired lady leaning her head on my shoulder. This was a Christian Service outing. We went about washing the windows of the cars in the shopping center parking lot and leaving a tract. Sometimes someone came as we did this and offered money, which we refused. It was our policy on all Christian Service to never take money. 

We were very busy those years, especially I. It takes a lot of hours to properly lead young people. (We had the junior high aged kids.) Plus I was adding to my duties at work. In 1976, I was named Systems Manager as well as being over the accounting functions. Now I was on call all the time in case the computer hit a snag. It usually hit those snags about dinner time.

I was writing again. I wrote a play which was performed by the youth group at venues such as retirement homes and other churches. I was editing a Christian magazine. 

Some of our old friends left us, finding our new outlook at odds with the lifestyle we had shared with them. We made new friends. We were doing well. The Pastor talked to us about our lost children and we came to accept what had happened. Then...

Then one day in 1977 my wife says to me, "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again."

"Whoa, now, how? You said you had your tubes tied?"

"I lied."

Immediately we had a problem. No doctor would take her case. Not her old doctors and seemingly no new doctor. They said her history showed it was impossible. We had been fools to let this happen. It was a terrible risk and there was no hope of a successful birth. I guess they feared malpractice suits if they took her case. 

But there was a Doctor who belonged to our church and he agreed to attend her. then the members of the church formed a special group to pray for us. My wife was put to bed for the term. I rearranged the living room for her, pulled the TV to within easy reach of the sofa, placed a cooler by her so she would have some cold drink and food at hand while I was at work. She was allowed to get up to go to the bathroom and to bed at night. 

The people at church began to stop by to help clean and especially to bring dinners for us. But mostly to pray for us.

Snow came in late February. My wife had made it into the dreaded fifth month. Then the signs came and in a blinding snow storm I drove her several miles to the hospital.

It was deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra put it. We were in a labor room with her hooked to an IV drip designed to stall off labor. There was another monitor, another beat-beat-beat and another week of waiting and expecting the usual dead end. 

The doctor asked if he could inject my wife with an experimental drug, something called steroids, in hope this would strengthen the babies lungs. We said yes. After a week, they said once more any longer delay was dangerous, they had to induce labor now.

And on March 1, our baby girl was born weighing in at 5 pounds. The steroids must have worked on those lungs because she came out protesting loudly. 

We named her Laurel. Many people assume this was after me, since my name comes from the same root and both Larry and Laurel mean Victory. This is not the case at all. We named her in honor of the members of Laurel Hill Bible Church who prayed constantly for her delivery. We gave her a middle name meaning "Little Christian", because Christ was now central in our lives. 

My wife assured me that this time she did have her tubes tied. 

Those gentle readers who have been regular followers of this Blog know God wasn't through proving what man couldn't do, He could.

   

One autumn day in 1980, as we walked along a chill street going to an early Christmas party, my wife says to me, says she: "Honey..."

"Ut oh."

"I think I'm pregnant again."

"But your tubes..."

"Lied...again."

"How long?"

"I don't think long. Maybe I'm in the second month."

A couple weeks later I am sitting in the waiting room of a hospital waiting to hear she had a miscarriage when a doctor comes out saying, "Congratulations, you have a daughter."

There was no human hand this time, no prayer circle, no laying in wait in bed, no steroids. My wife who could never have a baby and had that proved wrong now had it proved wrong medical aid was needed to do so. In a couple more years, we had a third, a son...and then she really did have her tubes tied. (More about these children next time.)

Today I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. I believe the Bible is God's Word. I believe all the promises God has made and that Jesus is coming again, perhaps very, very soon. I believe anyone can be saved if God draws them to Him. I don't believe it is ever too late until you die. In September of 1975, I was 34 years old. I had been spiritually dead a long time. I was a sinner who though he was a good guy, who didn't think the things he did were sins. Now next September I will be a Christian for 34 years. Half a life of sin, half a life of Salvation, half a life of growth in the Lord to go (using Yogi Berra logic again; I know fractions better than that).

So when I got saved I never faced any troubles again.  Yeah...right!

To be Continued: A Fairy-Tale Ending?                                              

And The Attacks Scale Upward

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.1 Peter 1: 3-7

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. Romans 5:1-5

When last we saw our intrepid hero, he was dangling over the cliff of unemployment by his fingertips with a baby in one arm. I had been sending out what seemed like hundreds of resumes and being sent on wild goose chases by an employment agency with whom I had signed. It reached July 1980 and I had received no positive feedback. I felt the medical center might be regretting telling me I could stay until I found something. Perhaps I felt that way because they were now hinting...well, telling...me I must be gone by September. 

Near month end, I got a call from a large bank in Delaware. 

Delaware? They had banks in Delaware? I had been in Delaware off and on during my life, but always on the way elsewhere. I didn't see Delaware as a place where people actually lived. It was a little state you went through to Maryland, Virginia or other points south. But indeed, in the flutter of resumes I had mailed, I had answered a newspaper ad for this bank in Delaware. It was for a job as Financial Analyst. I had never been a Financial Analyst, but I had once worked in a bank and I knew how to add up figures on a ledger sheet. I mean, how much more did I need to know?

I drove the forty-five minute trip from our PA. home to Delaware. This was my first time in Wilmington and it seemed to be all one way streets all going the opposite way than I needed to go. Good thing I left extra time. I found a lot to park in and walked back and found the building on Tenth Street.

My meeting was on the sixth floor, which was really the seventh floor, unless you counted the mezzanine, then it was the eight floor. (I don't know what distinguished it as a mezzanine -- lower ceilings, perhaps.) It is this way in the buildings down here. All the first floors are on the second floor. All the actual first floors are called Street Floor. (We don't count the one, two or three below ground floors as floors, just as basements.) 

My meeting with Mister K., who was Vice-president of Finance at the time, seemed to go well until his last sentence.

"I'm not sure Financial Analyst is the right position for you..." Well, that wasn't too encouraging. "But we have this new position in another department that might be right."

So he took me to talk to Double W. Double W was 11 years my senior and Vice-president over what was called Deposit Services and Data Preparation. There was a chemistry between us. We liked each other at once and he took me to meet the Assistant-vice-presidents of his three sections, who preceded to fire questions at me. At the end of this, he thanked me and said he'd be in touch.

A few days later, he called and said his staff liked me and things looked good. I just needed to meet his boss. He set up a luncheon appointment.

I traveled down again and we ate in the Brandywine Room of the Hotel DuPont, a restaurant full of dark wood. His boss was Mister C., Senior Vice-president of Operations. Once again I fielded a bunch of questions and felt it had went well. They would get back to me.

Once again, Double-W called me and told me he wanted me for the job. A few details had to be worked out and then he'd let me know when I would start. Great, I went into the medical Center and informed them I was going to a new job. They said, great and good bye, nice to have known you and my medical career ended like that.  

Then the waiting began. I was sweating it out in the dog days of August and the telephone wasn't ringing. Had something went wrong? After two weeks of growing anxiety, I called the bank. Oh, it was just procedures. Then I was told for my level the Senior Managers had to make the final decision at their meeting, which didn't take place until the 25th of August.

Though it cost me some toss and tumble nights, a positive call did come and I began my new job on September 3, 1980. Had an private office, too.  It didn't have any windows, but it came with a paycheck. I even began going back to evening college, now at a third university taking a major in accounting.

We were getting back on our feet. The house we were renting was nice, but maybe now we could start saving for a place of our own. Looked as if it was smooth sailing ahead, and for the next two months it was, right up until we were walking to that Christmas Party and my wife said, "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again." 

OK, she lied about tied tubes again and we weren't in Jersey near that Christian doctor and one can't expect too many miracles, can one? It wasn't a bit surprising a week or so later, before ever even seeing any doctor about it, she came and told me she was miscarrying. 

I got the minister's wife to stay with Laurel and we rushed off to the county hospital emergency room. They took my wife off somewhere and I sat on a hard bench in a massive waiting room. After a while a doctor came up to me, put out a hand and said, "Congratulations, you have a daughter."

What? How? My wife thought she was no more than two months along. She wasn't showing, not even a bump. She had a baby with no medical attention prior to birth and the baby lived? That's great.

Until they said the baby probably wouldn't live the night, she was too premature, too light. Today newborns under four pounds are probably at less risk, back in 1980 it wasn't promising. 

Then they told us they were sending her to another hospital, one which had a neonatal intensive care unit, one of the hospitals I use to budget, my last employer. We were then told even if our daughter survived, she would be blind and severely mentally retarded. "It would be better if she didn't survive," was their opinion. 

There was another problem. I had left the medical center at the end of July. I had started in the bank in September. My medical insurance had ended with the medical center. I had new medical insurance with the bank, but coverage for pregnancy did not kick in until I was employed there for six month.  It was now only December.

Our new daughter lived through the night. She was behind wired glass, inside a small glass rectangle called an incubator with a thousand tubes running into her. Every couple of hours they stuck a needle in her heel. She had jaundice and had to be under special lighting. my wife and I had opposing RH Blood factors, so the baby had to have a blood transfusion. She had a fever, she had something else, she had that. We could only hold her outside her little box for a brief time each day. The kid looked like a yellow plucked chicken with a tongue too large for her mouth. I said she looked like Alfred Hitchcock. She weighed 3 pounds 6 ounces.

Three weeks later, Noelle came home on New Year's Day 1981 inside a big red Christmas stocking (Picture on the right).

God had blessed us with another miracle. The hospital blessed us with a number of bills. Well, we'd just have to put off owning a house for awhile.

My wife's father had been acting erratically for awhile. (Her mother had died when she was 17.) He was convinced there were people hiding in his bushes at night, that someone might break in to rob him. He had demanded my wife return the house key and he kept a loaded gun under his pillow. He said if anyone tried to break in he would shot first and ask questions later. Needlessly to say when he wasn't answering the phone in May, my wife was concerned. We drove to his house, but no one answered the knock.  My wife went up the street to her uncle, who was her father's best friend, and he called the police. No one wanted to try and break in remembering that gun with which he slept.

He was unconscious. An ambulance took him to the hospital and they took him to surgery. the man had suffered from emphysema for years. He had lesions in his brain, apparently the effect of working with asbestosis in his youth. During surgery he had a heart attack and died, but the doctors brought him back to life.

If you call it life. He was on machines. The doctors told my wife any decision to turn off the machines were hers. They couldn't advise one way or another. I looked into her father's eyes and there was nothing there. Why they brought him back when he died made no sense. I talked with my wife. We prayed. She told them to turn off the machines and when the electricity died, so did he.  

She was an only child. All his estate went to her. We had a house of our own, but like the first car I got at 16 when my grandfather died, it came with a mortgage of guilt. 

The house was free and clear, but something of a mess. He had kept the outside up nicely, but ignored the inside. It was dingy and dark. junk was piled everywhere, old TV parts, a lifetime of old papers, the power mower and other yard tools stashed in the dining room. We found over $3,000 dollars in envelopes taped to the bottom of bureau drawers. The house was not really fit to move into with a baby and a three year old.

I spent all my free time in this house fixing up, cleaning, hauling away junk and painting. We wanted it ready to move into by the end of July because our lease was up August 1. I was working hard to make it and finally, sometime in July, I brushed on the last dab of paint and it was ready.

I didn't go there the next day, because I had classes that night, but on the day after I took my wife and two kids to see how nice a job I did. 

When I put the key in the lock, I thought I heard a strange noise. I threw the door open and I saw the source. Water was running down all the walls. The living room ceiling lay in a heap upon the floor, all the wallpaper had peeled off and all the hardwood floors were buckled.

I dashed down to the basement where the water shut off valve was located. I jumped into water up to my waist, fortunately I wasn't electrocuted. Firemen had to come to pump out the water. 

A inflow pipe had burst in the upstairs bathroom. How long it had been flooding the house, I don't know, but our interior ceilings were ruined as were the floors, all the kitchen cabinets and appliances and the furnace.All the wiring and plumbing would have to be replaced. Basically, the house had to be gutted and rebuilt to be livable. 

My daughter Laurel huddled shivering on the stairs. For years after she would have nightmares when it rained. The photo at the beginning of this post is my wife feeding Noelle in the ruined living room. You can see the despair on her face.

My father-in-law had insurance, but it would do only limited and basic repairs. We had to decide whether we wanted to stay there or sell the place. We were tired of moving. We decided we were going to stay in this house for a long time and would spend the extra money to built it with higher quality than the insurance would cover. Now I had to get a mortgage to cover the costs of this rebuilding and the remaining bills from Noelle's birth. 

But it seemed my wife's three wishes had been granted: I had a job I liked, we had babies of our own and now we had our own home. Maybe we really could settle down for a while.

And then in early 1982 my wife said: "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again." 

There was no thinking about it. She was. This time she got to a doctor and he determined so much scar tissue had built up she wouldn't be able to deliver naturally. Once again it was back to bed for the term and in August she had a Cesarean delivery of our last child, a son. he was also born prematurely.

He was the giant of our litter. He came into the world weighing 6 pounds 10 ounces. The hospital placed him next to a baby weighting over 10 pounds. We named him Darryl, not realizing that in the future this would subject us to a never-ending series of "Larry-Darryl-and-Darryl" jokes thanks to Bob Newhart.

Having a third child brought up another decision. The house we had was somewhat small for a family of five. Combining this with my long drive to Delaware everyday, we decided to sell the house after all and move once again, this time to Delaware. We have lived in this Delaware home for over 26 years now. I was employed by that bank for 21 years. Our kids grew up healthy into nice people and Noelle was not blind. Both she and Laurel were Honor Students. My wife and I have been married 47 plus years and I've been a Christian almost 34 of them.  

Through it all we have persevered.

And the first thing I did when we moved to Delaware was look for a Bible-Believing church.

Home at the Holidays: Christmas Decor

So Woman on a Mission posted some lovely pictures of her home decorated up for Christmas on her "Coffee, God and Me" Blog.  (Clicking on the title of this post will take you to her Blog.) She asked readers to do the same. I am posting some photos of my place in return. 

 

The photo to the left isn't one of them. It is of my kids taken on Christmas 14 years ago. (Hard to believe.) Their ages then were 16, 14 and 12. 

Stepped out side in the rain this evening at twilight and turned on the lights on our hedges.

The stocking of animal faces are hung on the rail.

Looking up to the living room level from the entryway.

The tree. It was in the other corner of the room until it fell over. Now it is here.
I put on the lights. My wife does the trimming.  That is "Holiday Inn" with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire playing on the TV.
The fireplace from the entry way.

The mantle. My wife collects nutcrackers. The picture is an Andrew Wyeth. We have a yellow lab like in the painting.  
More nutcrackers and my wife's ceramic village in the secretary desk cabinet.
Still some more nutcrackers in the hallway.
Top of the entertainment center, another Andrew Wyeth painting.
Hutch across from the dining room table.
The dining room.
The full dining room. The tower sticking up in the lower left corner is a cat scratching post.
The Santa in a hot air balloon hanging from the rafter. My kids high school graduation portraits are on the wall behind. 

Somebody else's turn.