November 19

I don’t recall the details of what happened after that.  I think she may have come up for a visit to reassert her place in my life.  But it was the first time I was to experience her possessiveness.  It didn’t get any better from there.

Her parents had wanted her to go to one of the Baylor campuses, but she somehow managed to graduate from school a semester early and started classes at Dallas Baptist that spring semester.  Of course there was the usual dating and heavy petting/groping and plans and dreams, etc.  But being good little Christians we were fighting a losing war.  Our upbringing and Baptist beliefs told us to plan on only one thing, and that was to keep ourselves spiritually pure and virgin.  But this wasn’t the New Testament era, nor were we growing up in rural America of the 18th century.  There were no ever-present extended families to keep an eye on us, and it was not an arranged marriage.  And we had these hormones raging through our bodies.  Well, I know I did.  And here’s the rub.  A normal kid at this point would grab a condom.  But to do so would mean that we were acknowledging that we intended to sin!  So we did what all fundamentalist christian kids do, we played with fire and told ourselves that I could always pull out before something irreparable happened.  It’s a great way to ease your conscience, and it’s also a great way to get someone pregnant.  And that is when things started to get weird.

Not too long after that, DeeAnne told me that she thought she was pregnant.  But before that news really had a chance to sink in, she said that she had had a miscarriage in the bathroom.  I think she even showed me the box she had put the fetus in, but had it wrapped.  She privately buried it in the prayer garden behind the women’s dorm and later showed me the spot.  Now I was just your typical stupid testosterone-filled male with shit-for-brains and it never occurred to me that this might be a contrived situation.  I believed her, I had no reason not to!  And before you know it we were talking about marriage.  But I wanted to ‘know’ for sure that this was God’s will.  ‘God’s Will’ – that one concept has caused more introspective, soul-searching, navel-gazing trouble than possibly all other Christian concepts combined.  But in the end what people are really looking for is confirmation that what they want to do is OK with God.  So I did some Bible reading.

I no longer recall the details, but basically I looked for some particular word that I thought would be unusual and then I looked to see if I could find this word a certain number of times.  Basically I was looking for a spooky feeling, not unlike when a skilled palm reader seems to have gained some insight into your private life.  “Well, then it *must* be real!”  I got the confirmation I wanted and that’s how I knew it was God’s will to ask DeeAnne to marry me.  In addition, just in case I had made a mistake somehow, there was the additional general principle from Paul about it being better to marry than to burn (as in burn with lust) and believe me, I was burning all right.
Now, in hindsight this is possibly the absolute worst reason in the world to make this sort of commitment.  And yet I was perfectly calm and assured about it, and neither her parents or my own could cast enough doubt to dissuade either of us.  We were getting married.

So that is how a girl of eighteen in her first semester of college and a guy of twenty in his fourth semester of college became engaged.  I continued working on the school work-study program, but went full-time for the summer.  Deeanne went back to Georgetown to prepare and we were married in August before the fall semester started.  I truly do not remember who her bridesmaids were.  The best men consisted of my brother, my best friend Gary from high school and some guy from Dallas Baptist that I don’t think I have even *seen* since the wedding, much less talked to.  His girlfriend played the organ.  My grandparents came down from Iowa as well as my Aunt Norma.  The rehearsal and dinner went well, and the next day the wedding went off without a hitch.  Many people said it was one of the most beautiful weddings they had ever seen, and this was not because of lavish decorations or an unusually amazing facility but because we had performed our own wedding song.

We sang a song that was just becoming popular, Leon Patillo’s ‘Flesh Of My Flesh’ which is the perfect song to go with the impossibly optimistic and idealistic Christian concept that God has one and ONLY one person picked out for you, and you must find them and marry young and live with them forever.  Here is what we sang to each other, with my comments interspersed:

You are flesh of my flesh
Bone of my bone
There’s no one closer
You are flesh of my flesh
Bone of my bone
We are one

I do pledge my life to you
Forever and always
I will take good care of you
And shower you with praise

Others try and separate us
But they don’t have a chance
No one else can take your place
No not even one

(Now who are these others trying to separate us?  We are just getting married!)

CHORUS

I do give my life to you
Today and everyday
I will stand right by your side
Whatever comes our way

I have searched and searched for someone
Who’d make my dreams come true
Nowhere else on this earth
Is there anyone like you

(Yeah.  I’m 20, she’s 18 and we have lived in one state our entire lives and we’ve already searched the entire world and dated people everywhere.  What a load of horseshit!)

Instrumental

The storms of life can blow and blow
But they won’t knock me down
We’ll stand the test
The test of time
Cause we stand on Holy ground.
Chorus

Yeah, we’re so mature and experienced that we know exactly what life will send our way and are prepared to handle it.

In fact, that was completely untrue.  We had NO business even attempting to sing that song any more than we did proclaiming the vows we did.  All emotion, no common sense whatsoever.

So we moved back to Dallas and lived in an apartment in Oak Cliff.  It wasn’t a horrible area but gunshots weren’t totally unheard of.  We both went back to school but a month or two into the semester I was called into the business office manager’s office and informed that by working full time in the summer I had run through the work study allotment and they were out of money.  I was given a number to call at Republic Bank Dallas and went in for a typing test and an interview.  I applied for a check processing position which required 35 words per minute.  I had taken two years of typing in high school so I felt confident, but I was a bit surprised when my results came back at 83 words per minute!  The human resources person took one look at that and told me that I didn’t want check processing.  He flipped through a printout and set me up with an interview with the Federal Funds department.  On my first day my supervisor took me on a tour of the facility, including their main downtown lobby.  The second floor over the lobby was a u-shaped balcony, and the underside was covered in hammered 14K gold.  I was very impressed.  I rode the bus to work almost every day and occasionally took our used car (although parking was expensive).  My main job was to go downstairs to the main trading floor where the traders were making phone calls back and forth all over the world.  Banks are required to keep a certain percentage of their deposits on hand (in reserve) but each day the rest of the money is loaned out in one shape, form or fashion.  For last-minute adjustments banks often loan money back and forth to make sure they meet their minimum reserve numbers.  The trades were scribbled by hand on pieces of paper and tossed into baskets.  I would collect these and take them upstairs and add them up on a calculator and attach the printout tape.  It was not unusual for each one of these trades to be in the 1-5 million dollar range.  It was fairly exciting work, although perhaps a bit monotonous after awhile.  I also operated huge copiers and did whatever else they needed.  I tried to learn it all.

Unfortunately it was a full time job and I couldn’t attend school and work so DeeAnne stayed in class while I worked.  That next spring I don’t remember if DeeAnne was still in school but an opportunity came up from some friends that I think we had met through school.  A local Baptist children’s home had an opening for dorm parents.  The big attraction was that during the school year the kids were at school all day.  This allowed the dorm parents to attend college or seminary, and many of them did.  So you got paid full time while still going to school.  It seemed like a great plan since our school attendance was basically on hold at that time.  I remember my boss at the bank attempting to talk me out of it but I was convinced it was the right thing to do.

While we were still at the apartments there was one situation that came up.  I basically decided that I would confront DeeAnne’s dad about his past abusive behavior, as it was still affecting her.  But at some point she became convinced that I was going to do it so she made a confession.  Most of the worst things she had described hadn’t happened!  I was unsure at first.  I thought maybe she was just telling me this so I wouldn’t confront him.  But as time wore on I realized she was telling the truth.  I began to question other things she had told me.  How was I to know when she was telling the truth and when she was exaggerating in order to gain sympathy?  Well, the fact is that I would never know and it was to be a constant issue for our entire marriage.

One other issue that raised its head was my level of responsibility.  I was working a ‘real’ job that paid well and was married and trying to finish school, and just that level of pressure began to manifest itself in strange ways.  One of my main ways to blow off steam and ‘relax’ and probably obsess a little was video games.  No big deal nowadays, but back then it was costing me 25 to 50 cents a game PLUS hours of my time.  I would sneak in a game or two just about any time I went to the convenience store, which was any chance I could get.  It was not a good match for married life.  It causes many an argument.  But I didn’t stop for years.

So we finally moved to the east side of Dallas and lived in an old brick dorm.  We had the younger kids on our floor, all boys.  I still remember many of them to this day, especially Rodney, Son and Luis.  Most of them were from parents going through divorce or alcoholism or drug abuse or just plain abandonment.  Rodney was perhaps my favorite.  He was probably mildly retarded and it was unknown if this was due to abuse or heredity or what.  He had the hardest time just getting his shoes on the right feet.  We put a big R and L in the bottoms and this helped him a lot.  One morning I noticed that he had relapsed to the wrong feet again.  I chided him a bit since I knew he knew better.  When he took them off to switch them the problem was revealed.  The letters had worn off!  It was so sad.  He said funny things that made no sense some times and he had his own odd pronunciations of certain words that we could never break him of.  I repeat some of them to this day on a regular basis.