Love Story (end)

I didn't come to college to avoid the draft, although, in the fall of 1966, I was very much aware of the alternative and wanted no part of southeast Asian jungles. During high school, my life was eaten up by athletics, in every season, in gyms and on successive fields. I don't regret that those years were all about sports. I was, in time and place, quite normal that way, moderately excessive.

My dad was never much of an athlete, but Mom was. The only "sport" for women in Oostburg High School, mid-Depression, was cheerleading--and she was one of them. Once I had a glove, she used to take me out in our backyard to play catch. I had no illusions about that--this wasn't just child's play; my mother meant to make me an athlete. She wasn't just tossing a ball, she was intent on making me good at it. Strange, but what I remember best about those moments was the deliberate speed of her pitching at me. I think she wanted to make me a man in the very traditional way of small-town America--she wanted to make me an athlete.

I don't remember playing catch with my dad, not that he was never in the backyard, not that he didn't want me playing ball. He simply didn't make himself available. I knew--and it was fine with me--that he was doing things that were worth his time and not spending time with me. He was mayor, for pity sake, and on the school board, and in the church consistory, while trying to make a living in a factory a half-hour away, an office where he wasn't always particularly comfortable.

Once I started playing little league baseball--we called it "pee-wees"--people would walk up to me after ball games and tell me how much I looked like my old man out there. They were wrong. No one remembered my dad holding down third base or hitting the ball all the way out to the bandstand; they remembered my uncle Allie, Mom's brother, doing such things. Even though I was slow out of the box, didn't grow into my adult proportions until I was 16, I was bigger than my dad, significantly, and therefore, to sports fans around town, I even looked as if I was Allie's boy. Dad didn't like that. Can't blame him.

It's fair to say, therefore, that I went to college to play ball. I didn't think of myself as a fanatic or a star, but I did believe I had skills, and I looked forward to playing basketball and baseball at the college where my sisters had attended, a college safe within the nest of our familial brand of denominational orthodoxy, one of just a couple campuses where all of "us" went. I didn't look forward to homework, and I spent some time worrying about not making the grade, about the possibility of flunking out, not because getting sent home would have meant a date with the draft board, but because I knew my failure would dishonor my parents.

I had a wonderful childhood in many ways, but one of the factors that that played a role in creating, in me, a sufficiently good self-image was that I was proud of who and what my parents were. We lived a block north of the church, but it wasn't proximity that brought a long line of church visitors to our home, it was my parents who wanted visitors to stay at our place, to eat at our table, to chat over coffee in the living room. Both of my parents loved talk, loved ideas, loved to understand the rudiments of the latest raging doctrinal controversy. They were very conservative, but then everyone was, but not intolerant.

The caricature Dutch Reformed father--senseless, brutish, a tool of his tools brandishing outsized conservative views, work-driven--that was not Dad. I got the idea for my novel Romey's Place from a cousin, who told me that her marriage counselor told her the problems in their marriage was created in part by the fact that her dad was just too good, that she needed to understand the man she'd married didn't have her father's qualities, nor would he ever. Her dad was my father's little brother. Romey's Place is about growing up with parents who are, in essence, too good, how being good can be a hindrance to grace.

I was a good, solid B student in high school; I wasn't Dean's List material. I got along well enough, maybe scored some good grades occasionally, but my own strengths as a kid were on display elsewhere--in the gym and among friends. There's no doubt that I had a comfortable life in the circle of the most admired kids. I was--as we used to say back then--popular. Kids liked me and wanted to like me. Aside from some fears of not performing academically, when I walked on campus for the first time, I wasn't fearful or shy, wasn't nervous, wasn't dying to be accepted, wasn't even all that worried, Vietnam or not. I was ready for college life. Bring it on.

There were some Harvey Dunn-types around back then, some guys so fresh from the farm they couldn't help carrying the aroma, some guys who had done nothing but the milking for most of their lives before being sent off to a "good" school, one that leaned heavily on the catechism and virtually assured eventual marriage vows in wooden shoes.

Miss Mary Hooper was not a professor. She had what we might call an "assistantship" today, if the college had a graduate school. It didn't. Miss Hooper was thoughtful graduate of the college just a year before, an excellent student and an English major. That made her qualified for a couple of classes of freshmen. I'm sure she came cheap. The college was, in 1966, just beginning its second decade, enrollments were rising. There was need. Miss Mary Hooper was recruited. She barely had time to take off her mortarboard.

I was enrolled in her first class. She was likeable because she was, for the college, a liberal, in that she allowed us to tell her the truth. She created a climate that was a bit slipshod for higher education, that felt more than a little like a semi-rambunctious high school classroom. We didn't bow and curtsey when she walked in, like we might have for some of the esteemed professorial types who stood behind the lecterns in other classes. When she stood behind the podium, she was the only woman I saw up there that first year.

She was not a raving beauty, but she was interesting to us because she was just unorthodox enough to make us pay attention. And then there was Hemingway and "A Sculptor's Funeral," and talk about literature's value and how to read it. I don't know how to say it, but I somehow found all of that really.

And writing. 

I can't find the paper right now, although I can't imagine having thrown it away. I kept it for 55 years because it's as important an assignment as I ever accomplished, not because I did such original work but because she loved it. She was a first-year teacher, reading student papers for the very first time--what did she know? She wasn't experienced, hadn't spent any time to speak of in the classroom, but when she handed back the little essay she had all of us do with, on mine, an A at the bottom and a single line, all in caps: "You can write, guy. You've got to write a novel someday," she changed my life, right then and there. 

One line of praise, one suggestion no one else had ever dreamed. One red sentence at the bottom of the page. That's how it is I'm watching the letters flash up on the screen right now and how it is you're reading them.

"You've got to write a novel someday."

So I did. And have.

And the first one, titled Home Free, bears this dedication:

Seriously, it's just another love story.