What did we know about having kids? I remember falling asleep in ten-minute segments the night Andrea Jane was born. We lived at 35th Avenue and Thunderbird Road, a half-hour from the downtown hospital where we were set for the birth.
Midnight-ish, as I remember, maybe a bit later, we drove downtown because it seemed to us rookies that it was time. The nurse at the hospital said it wasn't, told us go home, keep watching things, and come back when we knew for sure that the child was on the way.
After I finished the masters program, I had taken a job in a brand new high school on the city's northern edge (no more, by the way). Why? I wasn't sure I was cut out for more graduate school, I had loved high school kids, and I realized I had a good opportunity to teach a classroom full of different colored kids, a Room 222-thing, a bunch of students who'd greet me like Welcome Back, Kotter.
I got a job in a way that I still think jaw-dropping. I'd signed up for an interview when Glendale School District, ten or eleven high schools, would be on campus. I walked into an interview room where I met a blonde-haired guy, maybe 45 or so, a man named Robert Sterrett, who started the interview by asking me if there was one thing he thought he should know about me, one answer I could give to what Jim Schaap was, what would that be?
I find it amazing--and did, even at the time--that what popped into my mind as if it were always there was the first q and a of the Heidelburg Catechism. "That I belong, body and soul, to my savior, Jesus Christ. " That's what I told Sterrett, something drawn from the catechism of my youth, I told him.
I didn't need that job. I was still exploring possibilities--maybe even being a newspaper editor in some small town somewhere. If I didn't get it, there were other options. I say that because you shouldn't, and I didn't, think of my knee-jerk response as something brave and daring--I wasn't trying to be a witness or any such thing. That first q and a simply jumped from my memory to my lips, just like that. i
Robert Sterrett looked at me, shook his head, and said, "You got the job."
Easiest interview I ever had.
Sterrett was a believer, but he also had his reasons. He was looking for a male because his English department at Greenway High School already had 15 women. He was looking for an MA, someone to lead the troops; the year I came, Greenway had no seniors. My record as a high school teacher at Blackhawk was fine as wine, so once he heard the confession, any questions he might have had coming into the interview had left the room.
Two years later, we had a baby, Andrea Jane, and for both of us, looking homeward, back to the Midwest, seemed a good thing. When the Dean of the college I'd attended--and left angrily--called to ask about my teaching there, things fit together.
We had our first child early on the morning of March 9, 1976, after going home and then returning downtown when we could no longer imagine Andrea wasn't well on the way. By then it was early, and there was a moment--not much more--when we sat in our blue VW, stuck in rush-hour traffic, Barb's labor intense. That I'll never forget. But we got there fine, and the baby came forthwith, thanks be to God.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford, who'd pardoned Nixon, was on the ticket, along with a peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. I don't know who I voted for, the guy from Grand Rapids or the born-again Christian. I'm betting, even though I'd hated Nixon and gleefully watched as many minutes of the Watergate Hearings as I could, I had enough Republican blood in me to at least appreciate Ford's pardon of Tricky Dick, via a for-the-good-of-the-nation argument that sounded gracious.
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One more, I promise.
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