How A Guy Like Me Was Able to Marry a Girl Like That
I first met Kathleen Marsceau when I was in third grade. (If you want to hear me tell my story, accompanied by a few illustrations, click here) to continue reading click the link below.
My mom, my siblings, and I had been attending church about five or six miles away from our home. Since my dad generally didn’t attend church with us, mom didn’t drive, and Dad had to work on some Sundays, Mom decided to start taking us to a church about a mile from our house. Kathy was the pastor’s oldest child. As a third-grader I had no interest in the red-headed second-grader. Over the next few years we became friends. It was a small church so we were often in the same Sunday School classes, etc. Even when I began to look at girls “differently,” I had no romantic interest in Kathy. She was just the preacher’s kid.
An interesting
detour, at this point in our lives: I
think it was when I was in eighth-grade and Kathy in seventh, we both sang in a
choir. Kathy had taken piano lessons and
had been encouraged to sing all during her growing-up years and so was quite
musical. I had an OK voice and enjoyed
singing but there was a problem. My
thirteen-year old voice had not yet changed in the fall of 1963. I sang soprano. Kathy is a natural alto. Other girls in the choir had even deeper
voices than hers. I was somewhat
embarrassed to be singing ”La,la, la,” when
these girls, including Miss Marsceau, were singing “La, la la.” I quit.
I didn’t sing in a choir again until my second year in college. I stopped short of becoming a bass, I sang
tenor. Kathy was in the same group and
was still an alto, so all worked out OK.
Before I noticed what a lovely young woman the preacher’s
daughter had become, the love of my life was Donna Swagmann; unfortunately, or
so I thought at the time, I didn’t prove to be the love of her life.
(Cue the music to the
Girl from Ipanema.
Donna was tall, I’m guessing about
five-foot, ten inches, and, Oh, I thought she was so lovely, and when she
walked by I said, “AHH.”
For me it was “Tall and tan and young lovely, the girl from
Mozart Street goes walking.”
Donna
had long hair that would partly cover one eye, when it drooped down. Though it was long before she had been drawn,
it was kind of like Jessica Rabbit’s, and when it drooped down like that, she used
this little toss of her head to put it back in place. I thought that was about the cutest thing I
had ever seen. I had a Honda 50 Sport, a
little motorcycle that was barely more than a moped. I used to ride it to Donna’s house every
chance I got. That winter we had the
biggest snowstorm of my childhood, it shut school down for at least a
week. I remember Donna and I getting out
and walking in it. I walked her home,
she didn’t want to see me leave so she walked back toward my house with me. We got down to the end of her street, and
when she turned around to go home, I didn’t want to see her go, so I walked
back to her house.
About now would be a good time to say “Awww.”
She sent me a card about then. It was written so when you read the words it
sounded like a little child saying,
“I like you better than chock-lat covered
grab-crackers.
And I like chock-lat covered grab
crackers a lot.”
Nobody had ever compared me to graham crackers, much less
with chocolate on top. I was
smitten.
Soon, though, I
didn’t hear from Donna. She had started
hanging out with an older man—he was at least eighteen, and he owned a pick-up
truck—Alan Hahn. The rest of Sergio
Mendes’s ode to the lovely girl from the beach in Brazil came crashing down on
me:
“Yes I would give my
heart gladly,
But each day, when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at me”
But each day, when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at me”
For at least two days I purposely rode my Honda around with
no glasses on. That way people couldn’t
tell whether it was Donna or the wind from the bike that was causing my
tears.
One day I rode the little Honda over to Kathy’s house. It was only about a quarter of a mile from
Donna’s. What a Romantic setting, as I
remember Kathy was taking the trash out.
I asked her to go with me to a big banquet that our fellowship of
churches had every spring as an event for teens. It was a big deal. Girls wore formal dresses and the guys would
often rent tuxedos. Kathy turned me
down. It seems another guy, Danny, had
asked her to go. Kathy didn’t want to go
with him and had turned him down. She
told me that she was concerned that if she went with me it would hurt his
feelings. Danny was a friend of mine,
but I would gladly have seen his feelings get hurt.
The next time that banquet came around my little brother and
I spent the day cleaning up my dad’s 65 Pontiac. It was beautiful, but not nearly as pretty as
Kathy. We were really disappointed that
we had to leave that car in the driveway and ride to the big event with Kathy’s
parents and her little sister. In spite
of the lack of wheels we had a nice evening.
That was the only “date” I had with Kathy for more than a
year.
Kathy’s folks had decided that they didn’t want her to date
me. There were several reasons:
·
She is the oldest child in her family. Unmarried guys, just know that no one is ever
good enough for a man’s daughter. When
she is his first-born, even more so.
·
No doubt I didn’t handle myself as well as I
should. There were good reasons why a man who loved his daughter might not have
wanted her to marry me, or even date me.
·
Part of the opposition that Kathy’s dad had
toward her building a relationship with me was based on prejudice. My family is from the South, Kathy’s from the
North.
I hung in there.
When a guy goes away to college, my observation is that the
life expectancy of the girl back home is about
six weeks. There was no internet, no
email, and no cellphones. In fact the
only phone available for we guys to use was a pay-phone down the hall. Not only did you have to pay to use it, you
had to wait in line. And then on the
other end Kathy’s folks didn’t want her talking to me.
We wrote regularly.
When I would get a letter from Kathy I would vault up into the top bunk,
where I slept, and hungrily read it.
Often I’d read it again. That
year Kathy became my younger sisters’ piano teacher. My mom had a picture of me on top of the
piano. I’m told that piano lessons often
included crying sessions, because all three of them missed me.
I didn’t get to come home very much. On the few occasions when I did, we managed
to get together for some group events, and I’d hang out at Kathy’s house as
much as I could, but our opportunities were still severely limited.
Let me interject, at this point that from the spring of
1967, when I first asked Kathy out, until the summer of 1972 when we were
married, we were apart a lot. During the
68-69 school year I was in College in West Virginia and she was finishing high
school in Illinois. During the summer of
70 I was doing an internship in Pennsylvania, and Kathy was on tour with a
music team, then back home in Illinois.
In the 71-72 year, Kathy was still at ABI in WV and I was at
Baptist Bible in PA. Still no cellphone
or internet. I stayed in Pennsylvania
through most of Christmas break so I could work. I developed a great liking for a John Denver
tune. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrEljMfXYo. Even when we were home, and only lived about
a mile apart, our opportunities to see each other were still quite limited, so
during the five years just before our marriage, we were probably apart more
than we were together, in the usual dating sense of being together. Not being able to be together as much as we
wanted to be, or as much as most of our friends were able to be with their
romantic interests, was hard—sometimes it was very hard—but it was good. Being apart forced us to build the foundation
of our relationship on spiritual realities and not physical attraction. In those days Appalachian Bible Institute had
a strict “no physical contact” rule. We
kids called it the “six inch rule.”
Dating couples could only be together on Friday nights, for about half
an hour on Wednesdays, and Sunday afternoons.
We got pretty good at “just happening” to walk down the hall when we
thought the other one might be headed that way.
To get back to the chronological record, in the fall of 69
Kathy joined me at ABI. For the first
six weeks of the semester new students—that would be Kathy—couldn’t date. It sure felt good, sometime in October, to go
up to Des Plaines Hall and walk Kathy over to the dining room for Friday night
supper. For the first time we were able
to be together without anyone telling us we should be apart. It was wonderful.
Shortly after that Kathy broke up with me.
I was quite convinced that I should marry Kathleen
Marsceau. She wasn’t convinced she ought
to marry Howard Merrell.
It works best if you marry each other.
Two interesting stories (at least interesting to me) about
this time:
Because of the rules we lived under and our personal
standards, I had never kissed Kathy. The
trip from ABI back to our home town was about twelve hours by car. Neither of us had a car so our options were
limited. On this trip, Kathy and I ended
up sitting in the back seat of a car, side by side, for a number of hours. A couple of months before I would have loved
to have been in that position. No six
inches between us here! We weren’t mad
at each other or anything, in fact we were friends, but being in that position
with someone that I wanted to be romantic with, yet couldn’t, was awkward, to
say the least. To make things even more
interesting, it was snowing. The roads
were quite slick. Paul, who was driving
at the time, was having trouble keeping the car under control. It was dark.
I whispered in Kathy’s ear, “If it looks like we are going to have a
wreck, I’m going to kiss you before I die.”
I was slightly encouraged by the fact that she didn’t slap me or object
too much. Shortly after that the car slid
off the road and Paul was driving us down a ditch, like a sled going down a
bobsled run. I was so scared that I
forgot to kiss Kathy. That had to wait a
while.
Kathy may not have
smacked me when I vowed to kiss her before I died, but she still wasn’t ready
to give herself to me. When we returned
to school we began acting like people who were no longer going together. For one thing there was the Christmas
Banquet. We weren’t going with each
other, so I asked Joyce to go with me, and Kathy did the girl thing and let it
be known that it would be OK if a guy other than me asked her out. She ended up going with Neil. About then my roommate—a guy committed to
“playing the field”--and I constructed a device for deciding which lovely lady
we were going to date next—a spinner made from a paper-plate & a piece of
cardboard.
At Christmas break Kathy and I were back at our parent’s
homes. We went separately, but we both
ended up at our old high school to attend a concert. We ended up taking a walk together. It was a setting every bit as romantic as the
garbage can meeting of a couple of years before, right outside the
auto-mechanics shop. I think Kathy took
my hand and looked at me. She said, “I
can’t go on like this anymore.”
“Would you like to go for a ride?”
She said, “Yes.”
I had that same ’65 Pontiac that I had cleaned up for that
date that hadn’t gone as planned. I’m
not sure how I kept that car in the road because I never looked where I was
going. My focus was on the lovely Miss
Marsceau, who had just said, “I can’t go on like this.” My list of who I was going to ask out when I
got back to school vanished. My mind’s
paraphrase of what I heard Kathy say
played in my head like a symphony, “SHE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT ME!”
I’m going to jump forward about twenty-five years at this
point. Kathy and I were once again
sitting side-by-side in a vehicle. She
was in the middle of my pickup truck, I was driving, and our younger son,
Chris, was riding “shotgun.” It was
toward the end of Chris’s senior year in high school. He had been dating a cute little athletic
gal, named Nancy, for quite a while. He
loved her. He knew that in a few months he would be at
Cedarville College in Ohio and that Nancy would be at University of
Virginia. He had seen his older brother
and others go off to school. He knew the
life expectancy of the girl—or the boy—back home. He was struggling.
I swallowed hard and told him, “Chris, you have to decide
whether you want somebody else now, or Nancy later. It is a matter of commitment.” Kathy and I liked Nancy. We trusted Chris, but those were frightening
words. I was proposing something that I
knew could lead to what actually did happen, that Chris would marry Nancy. Was that a decision that a high school senior
ought to be making?
Back in our time, Kathy was still struggling with that
decision. She was attracted to me, but
there were other guys that she found attractive, as well. There were many reasons that other guys were
attracted to Kathy, not the least of which was that most of them had good
eye-sight. How could she commit to me
when she was attracted to other guys? (I
don’t want to give you the idea that Kathy went around lusting after every hunk
she saw. She didn’t. But, she had spent time with some Godly young
men and enjoyed her time with them.)
Fortunately,
especially for me, Kathy did some office work for Bill Kennedy, Dean of
students and a capable Bible teacher.
She sought his counsel and he told her that attraction was not the main
point. Love, and therefore loving
relationships, are based on commitment.
Our relationship grew.
Kathy was willing to commit to go forward with me. Which gave me the opportunity that I
wanted. Obviously, she couldn’t resist
my charms.
I saw in Kathy a wonderful package. She was (and is) beautiful in this soft,
somewhat innocent sort of way. The word
is overused and misused, but I found her (and still find her) to be “sexy.” Since way back when she was in high school, I
had seen in her a powerful love for others, even others who weren’t all that
lovely. I remember watching her as she
did visitation at a nursing home. The
way she reached out to those old folk with kindness and respect, impressed me
deeply. I saw an inner beauty in her
that matched what I saw on the outside.
I can honestly say that I tried to not make this the basis of our
relationship, but not only was my love for Kathleen Marsceau growing, but my
desire for her was increasing. I wanted
her.
One thing that was not growing, however, was her parents—in
particular her dad’s—acceptance of me.
If anything his opposition to my continued courtship of his daughter had
increased. There was an odd mix. If you had asked Pastor Marsceau--that’s what
I called him--“What would you like for a young man from your church to do to
impact his world for the Gospel?” His
answer would have been pretty much what I was doing. Likewise, I think if you had asked him, “What
kind of man do you want your daughter to marry?” I think with the exception of where my family
was from, and a few other minor points, the description he was looking for
resembled the resume’ I was building. As
I have said several times, I hung in there.
My tenacity became an irritant.
Kathy’s dad just wanted me to go away and leave his daughter, and them
alone. Obviously, my motives were not
completely pure. Samson famously said
about the woman he wanted to marry, “Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well” (Judges
14:3, KJV). No doubt, Kathy pleased me
well. In Twentieth Century America, however,
parents didn’t “get” a wife for their son.
I had to do that myself. And I
was determined to do that. There was,
probably, also another motivation at work here.
I wanted to win. In spite of our
disagreement over his daughter, I respected my pastor, Kathy’s dad, but
concerning this matter one of us was going to win and the other lose. Either Kathy was going to become Mrs. Howard
Merrell, or she would be married to someone else. I was determined to win, or more accurately I
couldn’t stand the thought of losing.
Years before this, back when I was in high school, I had
come to the conclusion that if there was any one area of my life that I didn’t
want to mess up, this was it. Don’t mess up the relationship with the
woman you marry. (I put an account
of how I first came to this commitment at the end of the week 5 lesson, “What I
Learned in the Locker Room.”) This was
long before Joshua Harris (the author of one of our text books had “Kissed
Dating Good Bye.” Even though the Courtship Movement had not yet been
invented, I believed, and was committed to one of its foundational
principles—that is that fathers have a
prime responsibility for overseeing and ensuring the welfare of their unmarried
daughters. I still believe
that. I don’t have any daughters, but I
have five granddaughters, and I want my sons to care for them and guide their
relationships.
I’ll be honest;
there is room for disagreement, here. I
was, however, absolutely sincere in what I was trying to do. I wanted to marry Kathy
and was convinced that it was good for me to move in that direction. This was a conclusion that was reinforced by
the observation of a number of Godly people, some considerably older than us. While Kathy was behind me in coming to the
point of full commitment, and the opposition of her parents impacted her far
more than it did me, there was a growing conviction in her heart that she
should become my wife. How could I, how
could we, move toward marriage—something we wanted to do, and felt was
right—while at the same time honoring the parental authority that we believed
the Bible teaches? This was my
conclusion: As long as Kathy’s parents
continued to oppose our marriage, and she remained a part of their household, I
would not marry her. What that meant in
our thinking was that if her folks continued to oppose our union then Kathy
would take responsible steps to become independent of her parents. When she was living on her own and supporting
herself, then I would marry her. Some
may say that this was just young-love-romanticism. Perhaps, but even after almost half a century
of reflection, I don’t think so. One
thing is clear, we were determined to do what was right. You may disagree with our conclusion about
what was right, but we were determined to honor God as we moved ahead. An important part of that determination was
our commitment to obey God and honor Him in the way we conducted ourselves
toward one another physically. I, by
this time I think I can say “we,” wanted each other, but more, we wanted to make
sure that we didn’t mess this up. (We’ll
talk about this some more in a later lesson.)
Be watching, the conclusion I just stated, worded in an
unfortunate way, will show up again in my story.
This was a time of growing love and intensifying conflict. It wasn’t that we were fighting, we seldom
did, but the opposition from Kathy’s parents intensified. Since Kathy’s dad had long before concluded
it was useless for him to oppose me directly, all the opposition was channeled
directly toward Kathy. It was hard. Looking back over the blessing of being
married to Kathy for forty-four years, I am very thankful, that she was willing
to work through that hard time. As I
watched Kathy grow, I was more convinced than ever that I wanted this woman to
be my wife.
On a late
winter/early spring warm day in 1971, out in front of the girl’s dorm, I asked
Kathy. “If I ask you to marry me, would
you say “Yes”? She looked at me with those
beautiful green eyes and said, “YES.” To
which I replied, “I just wanted to know.”
I had taken an off-campus job to pay off I debt caused by one of my
foolish escapades. I stayed on at the
Dr. Pepper plant, after my debt was paid, so I could save money to buy Kathy a
ring. So, I suppose you could say her
diamond is made out of old pop-bottles.
We finished that school year, I graduated, and we immediately left on a
two week choir tour. The tour that
spring took the choir to the area around our home. Our first concert was only about twenty miles
from our hometown, so I made arrangements with our choir director to leave
before the rest of group, go home, and then meet the choir in time to help set
up for the concert. I shared my
intentions with Mr. Shepherd, the choir director, and a couple of other
trusted friends. I asked them to pray
for me as I went to talk to Kathy’s dad, and ask for the hand of his daughter
in marriage. I wrote to Pastor Marsceau,
and told him I was coming, and why I
was coming. The schedule was tight, so I
basically drove all night to get there.
The next day when I enquired at Kathy’s home, I was disappointed, and
somewhat angered to find out that he wasn’t home. He had gone fishing. I can’t remember, it was several days or maybe
a week later, that I was able to talk to Kathy’s dad. It was tense, to say the least. I made my request.
He replied, “What are you going to do if I say ‘no’?”
In a response that has to go down in history as one of the
most poorly phrased statements imaginable I said, “You’ll slow me down, but you
won’t stop me.” I knew what I meant, by
now you do as well, but I am sure my words did not communicate that I was
struggling to do right. Rather they must
have sounded to him, like the brash words of a head-strong young man, who
unfortunately, from her dad’s perspective, was in love with his daughter. I don’t recall that I ever heard him say why
he went on to respond as he did; it wasn’t a scene that either of us wanted to
revisit, but he gave me a reply that was a reluctant yes, and clearly not a
no. I’m still smiling.
When we returned from tour, Kathy and I had only a short
time before we needed to go on to our summer assignments. She was going on tour with a college music
group and I was headed home to work for the summer. We had a wonderful day or two together. The Dr. Pepper ring had arrived. I asked the question and she said yes. Since school was out, Kathy was staying at an
older friend’s apartment, and I was now a graduate, we were not under school
rules for those few hours. We walked
around campus and kissed each other in every place we could think of, in the
library, the laundry room, out in the yard, wherever we wanted.
About fourteen months later I stood before an assembly of
friends and family, and made my vows to Kathy.
She did the same. We heard
Kathy’s Dad, our pastor, say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
I can’t say that we have live happily ever after, but mostly
so. We are very grateful for what God
has done in our lives.
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