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No, really, Susan's the gift that God gave me to make sure I was never bored or lonely. Our meeting each other made sure of that. Susan was working at the local USO one Sunday morning in mid-1968 when I came into the place. One look at her told me all I needed to know and I greeted her with a friendly "Hello, wife!". She looked at me as if I had just gotten off a UFO and had three heads. However, all was just fine and she replied with a friendly "Get lost, idiot!".
I couldn't believe it! Here I was, the best thing that had ever happened to her and she wasn't even interested. Actually, it took quite some time to get her to open up and simply talk to me. It seems that she thought I was totally obnoxious. However, I turned on all the charm I had and now, after 33 years, her opinion of me has changed quite a bit. She now knows (no doubt in her mind at all) that I'm totally obnoxious, she knows a lot of other "not-so-nice" things about me too.
If our first meeting wasn't so good, the next several months could only be called "interesting" - maybe even in the Arab sense. The Arabs have a curse they can lay on you, "may you live in interesting times" - and they consider things like the Crusades, or the time of Genghis Khan to be "interesting times". Shoot, in that context, our entire lives together are "interesting". However, it sure has been fun!
I'm not sure that our relationship back then could even be called "dating". It certainly wouldn't be called that today, I'm sure. We tended to travel in somewhat different circles, she had her friends and I had mine. The wonderful thing about it all was that the two groups had a strange tendency to be in the same place at the same time. We'd talk occasionally, and a few times we even went out together in the odd hours of the morning (1-4 AM) for an awful lot of coffee and french fries - almost always in a place called Curry's Cafeteria, one of those 24-hr places where you could always get pretty good food. We also spent a fair amount of time in a car wash, making sure her nearly new 1967 Chevy Impala was looking fit and trim.
Hm, thinking on that, not a whole lot has changed over the years - it's 3:30 AM as I'm writing this and I've got a plate of fries sitting right next to me, along with my coffee pot.
Anyway, that was about the extent of our "dating". When it really got interesting was when I graduated from Syracuse University. My parents were there, my fiance' was there, and Susan was there along with a couple other girls I dated at the time. Yeah, you read that right, fiance'-Susan-other-girls. I was young then, and way far beyond the normal meaning of foolish! I'd know a lot better now - I wouldn't have invited the other girls. Anyway, after the ceremony I took my parents and fiance' out to dinner, showed them around town and dropped them off at the hotel. Then I called Susan, and we spent the rest of the evening together. Years later, I told my parents about that and they were rather put-out. Seems they would have liked to have spent the evening with her too.
Needless to say, the fiance' became history and I was sent to my next duty station, in Texas (San Angelo and Goodfellow Air Force Base). This was where we really spent time talking - on the phone, long-distance. For three months I called her almost every night, reversing the charges - of course. Hey! It was OK, I was only a Airman and she was the owner of a nearly new car and working for a trucking company, with a membership in the local union. She had to be rich, ya? Well...........
It was during these phone conversations that I asked her, "so when are we getting married?", to which she replied, "well, it's about time. How about June 21st?". That was it, my proposal and her acceptance! And, that's the way it happened - on June 21st 1969 we were united in God, in the presence of most of her family and mine too. After paying the long-distance phone bill, we were off to our first duty station together - Anchorage Alaska.
Oh, the stories I could tell about that trip! They'd have to be published as "fiction" though, nobody who doesn't know us would ever believe them. But more to the point is that here we were, newli-weds and near strangers, in a car, going to a place neither of us had ever considered in the remotest sense as a place to live. As it turned out, that first year or so together was pretty rough for us. We had almost no money, even less food and with one very fond exception, no help in any way from anyone else. But, we had a lot of fun together and we forged a bond that became unbreakable. Even today, more than 30 years later, one of us can start a sentence and the other can finish it. Conversations can go on for months, literally, starting one day, continuing a couple weeks later, and finishing weeks after that - and we keep it all straight! We've even gotten stuck in a conversation - couldn't remember a name or some such until weeks later when one of us would suddenly blurt out that one word that stopped the conversation in the first place, and we'd continue it all right from there.
This is the stuff of magic, the stuff of soul-mates, the stuff of the perfect marriage. I don't regret a day of it!!!!
God's been there with us, all the way. He was there when we had nothing, he was there when we had everything (and nothing, at the same time). Actually, I think God's enjoyed it all too, maybe even as much as I have. After all, God's got a sense of humor too - he put me here in the first place, and he let me stay!
There's so much more, maybe some day I'll pick this line up and really entertain y'all. Just know this, through thick and thin, through joy and heartache, God's been there watching over us. There have been so many incidents in our lives together that could have been totally disastrous and He's always pulled us through. This is one of the reasons I like that "Footprints" poem so much - it fits!
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