It is a pretty well-known story among
our family but I am glad to share it here.
When I was being
called to First Presbyterian Church of South Bend in 1982, there were 9 people on
the search committee. Judy’s dad was one of them. So I got to know him long before I met
Judy. Then in the first month I was in
South Bend, each of the members of the search committee were charged with the
responsibility of asking me to some event, dinner, lunch, etc. Dottie and Don invited me to a picnic in the
park, the park being the one you can walk to from “Mayor Pete’s” house in South
Bend.
At the
lunch, which was delicious, Dottie talked about her oldest daughter Donna who
was married to Mike and lived in LaGrange, Georgia with their dog Debit. For about 20 minutes, at least. So much so that by the time the conversing about
Donna was over, I felt that I could have picked her out of a lineup, even
though I had never met her in person. Then,
Dottie shifted the conversation to her youngest daughter, Karen, who was soon
to be married to Ken, and they were going to live in Muskegon, Michigan. Again, there was a lot of conversation about
Karen.
After that
Dottie said, “And I have another daughter…”
That was it. Not her name, not
the fact that she lived IN TOWN, not the fact that she was a member of the
church, and not the fact that she was serving as a DEACON at that moment.
Apparently
Dottie went home and then called Judy and said, “You’ve got to meet the new
minister, he’s darling.” To which Judy
replied, “Mom, I am not going to date a minister…” Well, you see how that tuned out. Never say never.
Fast forward
to a month or so later, September 13 (my birthday). When I went to my very first Deacon’s meeting
at the church. There we were in the
Board Room at the long executive style conference table, with me at one end,
and way down at the other end, this cute redhead. The deacons all told me their names. And that was when I found out that Judy was the
secretary of the Deacons, and more importantly, Don and Dottie’s mysterious “other daughter”.
Well, I thought to myself, I have to get to
know this girl.
So after the
meeting was over, the officers stayed for a few minutes to go over something that I have since forgotten, and then as we were heading upstairs and to the parking lot, I said
to Judy, “How about stopping at my apartment on your way home for a Coke.” Which she agreed to. She says that as she followed my car there,
she kept thinking to herself that her parent would die if they knew she was
going to my apartment.
Once there, I
put out some cheese and crackers and offered Judy some Drambuie, (not the Coke I
had mentioned). I guess that, and the fact
that I had “real furniture” and not dorm type plastic crates, was kind of
impressive. We enjoyed the refreshments,
and as we did, we talked about lots of things, mostly about what was important to
us in life, but we also discovered that both of us had been going to Bethany
Beach for summer vacation, for years, and probably passed each other without knowing it, there. Of course, since one of us is five years
older than the other (I will not say which), probably neither would have paid
it much attention back then.
The upshot
of that first meeting is that we soon had a first date and before long were
both feeling that this was something very special indeed. But neither of us wanted to admit it because
we were waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, in other words, to find out what
was “wrong” with the other person.
Well that never
happened, and the rest is history.
No comments:
Post a Comment