Young Love (#86)

September 1, 1969

Nate and I were getting closer to the start of a new school year in Champaign – him is law school, me as a teacher. After a double birthday party in Wilmette for my brother Tom and our Dad, the next event was seeing Tom off to college in the East. He had transferred from Wheaton to American University and would be driving to Washington DC the day after his party. We wouldn’t see him again until Thanksgiving.

Mom was clearly having trouble letting go – her baby, a first son, the boy who’d arrived after doctors said “no more,” the child born on her husband’s 50^th birthday. Her words were that Tom wasn’t ready to launch, but the truth? She wasn’t ready.

Tom was thrilled to be spreading his wings. After a breakfast together, we waved him off, and I wondered how Mom would cope. When he’d been a Wheaton student, she’d made frequent visits to his campus 25 miles from home. She would do his laundry, bring his favorite foods, drive him home for weekends – in other words, continue as a strong presence. Now there would be 1000 miles between them, and it was a blow to her.

I didn’t understand that at all. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have anything to do.

She was the every-week organist at Moody Church (two Sunday services, Wednesday prayer meetings, Thursday choir practices). She ran 4 children’s choirs. She cooked dinner at the church for over 100 people every week and taught a Sunday school class of high school girls (left). She hosted a young people’s Bible study at her house.

The church was 45 minutes from home, but that didn’t stop her from driving there repeatedly each week to practice on the 4-keyboard organ, nor did it keep her from attending many other church meetings – such as Missionaides, a group that sewed for missionaries. Each week en route to that, she’d pick up a crowd of elderly ladies who wanted to go but didn’t drive.

She accompanied at scores of weddings and funerals, entertained weekly at home, welcomed youth groups for their socials (right), and spent time memorizing entire books of the Bible. (That was why she kept pages of Scripture rubber-banded to her steering wheel.)

Mom was also managing the redecorating of their new home, painting every room herself. She was shopping for carpeting, drapes, appliances, and furniture with the goal of having it all in place before our November wedding.

Oh… and she was planning that wedding. With everything else going on, it had sunk to the bottom of her long list, and as it turned out, mine, too. Nate and I were on the verge of moving out of town when it finally dawned on me why my parents had wanted us to wait a year before getting married. But it was too late to worry about that now.

Next on our agenda was to load up again, clock those 156 miles back to Champaign, unload (with law school friends, left), and prepare for a new school year.