Whether, in this madcap courtship, any political compatibility tests were administered between Barbara and me, I don't remember. We were an odd couple. Both of us knew something of the other--this much at least, that neither of us had been, well, celibate. We'd both been around the block with significant others; we were veterans, even bloodied, by relationships--how can I say it?--that didn't work out. We already knew what didn't have to be said, and I'm darn sure she knew she wasn't getting into a relationship with the kind of Young Republican I might well have been in high school. Or a saint.
In 1972, Senator George McGovern got shellacked by Tricky Dick, who, ridiculously, held up both arms and won in a landslide. I don't remember grieving or throwing a fit, but I was undergoing a psychological test my brand new life administered. I was in graduate school, I was married--I'd hauled this beautiful woman along to Arizona, even though I'd not been bull-headed about it. At some point, I'd told her that my time at Blackhawk High School was going to end because I was going to graduate school. She made her own connections, came up with an Arizona teaching job, then let me know she had--and suggested that she'd be willing to consider coming to the desert with me. I sprang an engagement ring on her, but I don't know that I ever asked her to marry me. The relationship took on its own lovely momentum. Thus, we spent our very first Christmas together around a scrawny little Christmas tree we sawed down in the snow on Arizona's Mogollon Rim. . .our first Christmas and we'd already been married six months.
Neither of us were Johnny Cash fans, but sure as anything "we got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout." Was a delight. Still is. Wouldn't trade it for anything.
I'm guessing that I didn't break down and cry about the Nixon landslide because the times, they were a'changin' again. In graduate school I had profs I liked a great deal who had no time whatsoever for the mythology of historic Christianity, profs who lambasted Calvinism, while explaining how immeasurably pervasive it was in the early years of the Republic. The thing is, I knew people who were the 20th century equivalents of Cotton Mather, face down on the floor all day long to repent of sins that weren't at all evident. I knew people who, if given the opportunity, would without question toss women they considered witches out of the church.
I understood why Emily Dickinson refused when her teachers told the students to indicate their need of salvation by standing and saying so. Somehow, in a grad program at Arizona State University, we were covering familiar territory; but when I looked around at the other students I didn't see anyone as personally engaged as I was. None of them looked as if they recognized themselves in the Calvinism of Melville's Captain Ahab.
One moment in those early months I'll never forget, even though the slight seems silly today. "So," the prof said, when I met him in his office, "what was the name of that college you attended again?"
When I told him, I tried to explain. "It's like a cousin of Calvin College," I said.
"Calvin?" he said as he lit a cigarette. He had no idea there was a Calvin College.
In a sense, I was relieved. I'd left Dordt College wondering whether I'd made the right choice four years before, whether I shouldn't have matriculated at Calvin, where the anti-war sentiment built up far greater force. Professor Marvin Fischer, ASU, may never have heard of Dordt, but he hadn't heard of Calvin either. I was in a whole new world, but I was also alone.
I bought Calvin's Institutes on my own. It wasn't a required text. I'd never read any of it in college. My motivation was something I remember clearly: I'd begun to understand that this whole Calvinism business was something far bigger than what I'd experienced as a boy in Oostburg and a college kid in northwest Iowa. Calvinism was there at the birth of the nation I'd been born into, not only that but it had a starring role.
Three years out of a college education I'd sometimes grown to regret, I found myself fascinated by this whole Calvinist thing because I understood for the first time that I'd been part of something much bigger than myself, something I'd never really understood. I can't help thinking that Arizona's legendary frontier conservatism (the Goldwater state) took a toll on me too, but so did a slowly opening vision that made me think so much of what I'd regretted just a few years before was even more encompassing and formative in a broader world I was just beginning to discover.
That spring, one Sunday when I was in Chicago to see Barbara, we went to church together--First CRC, South Holland, IL. First time in a long time for me. Place was huge. Preacher stood way, way, way up front and held forth in a sermon I thought could well have been spoken in Latin or Afrikaans it seemed so lifeless. I didn't say it to this woman with whom I was hopelessly in love, but I certainly wondered what on earth drew people to have to attend such a stultifying thing.
When we were married, we went to church, both of us--me, returning.
Politically, in Arizona, a graduate student, this peacenik slid over a bit to the right once more. I don't remember bawling when the anti-war forces were crushed in McGovern's loss. Why not? Because I was leaning more to the right than I'd been for years.
The truth?--I don't even remember voting.
___________________
I know I promised this would be the last, but there's more to the story. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.
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