Our Story...a Memoir

This morning, I sit alone in our dining room, looking out from the large picture window onto our treed backyard in Johns Creek, Georgia. The winter scape here is stunning. The maples and oaks stripped of their leaves reveal tall, solid structures, grounded by time and rooted in place - their strength and stance only magnified by the backdrop of dark, feathery garlands of Georgia cedars and pines. This morning, it is foggy and misty, the haze like a bridal veil obscuring my view of anything at a distance. And, I am transported back 44 years to my wedding day.

February 7, 1981, was a day just like this. Foggy. Misty. Cold. Anything at a distance, hazy and obscure. And, I was just as alone.

But, first …. how we met …

January 1979

Martin and I met at a college fraternity party on a snowy night in mid-January. It was an unlikely meeting. I had transferred to Morehead State from the University of Kentucky my senior year, and Martin had just arrived from England on a full scholarship to play tennis for the university. Neither of us belonged to a Greek society. We were both guests at the pleasure of different members that night.

I remember not wanting to go. I was dealing with a very personal loss and heartbreak. The blue corner of my cinder-block dorm room had become a self-made cocoon where I had spent the last several days and nights swaddling all my broken pieces, trying to figure out how to construct a new me — or at least, a new face.

That night, a girl named Ellen, whom I had just met in one of my English classes, was determined to cheer me up and invited me to go with her to a fraternity party. I was not a partier. In fact, I had always found crowds to be isolating. But, she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, saying that a night out would “do me good.” If she only knew. So, I reluctantly pulled on my winter coat, a fur-lined KA jacket I had picked up in the Lost and Found sale at the UK Student Union, and headed out into the dark, white night.

Ellen drove a mud-splattered 4-wheel drive Jeep, which was perfect for maneuvering in bad weather, but the plastic top and sides only dulled visibility and offered little refuge from wind that seemed to slice swirling snow into icy sheets and lay them like covers onto the black pavement. Slowly, we edged our way off campus onto unlit country roads. Having lived in Eastern Kentucky all my life, I was familiar with roads like these; they coil like snakes around fragile shale cliffs and icefalls and offer only contiguous narrow slips away from steep mountain drop-offs and rocky creek beds. I think it was Chaucer who said, “familiarity breeds contempt.” And, he was right. I knew all too well what these roads took from you and never gave back. So, as we crawled along the miles, I made silent deals with God to live a holier life if he would, just this once, spare me from my stupid decision to venture out on a night like this.

The fraternity house that looked more like a barn stood in a frozen, fallow field that served as a vast unmarked parking lot. After skidding to a stop, I could hear the house better than I could see it. Inside was a typical scene: clumps of students, cups and bottles in hand, raising their voices over the din of 70-s rock-n-roll, generating their own heat, and pushing cigarette smoke to the rafters. The room was feverish, thick, and tight. It was a racket and everything I was dreading.