Little Cherry Pies (Why I Married My Wife)

***

I was drowning. Judi was air. Only, I wasn't supposed to breathe.

***

I wasn't such a great fiancée. In fact, I think I was about the worst fiancée ever. This was due, strangely enough, to the fact I really, really, REALLY liked Judi.

My attraction to her womanly charms was so bewilderingly overpowering that it ran head on into a major life commitment I'd made before meeting her again seven years after I'd first asked her out at Auburn Adventist Academy in Washington State. Back then, we were still in the kitten and puppy stage of the courtship game. It took me three days to work up my courage to ask Judi to our high school Freshman Class Party. I couldn't think of anything to say all evening, and feared a repeat performance. I went back to the dorm that night, wrote her a song, and hid it in a box in my closet.

Now, however, we were all grown up. The game turned deadly earnest.

The major life commitment to which I refer was my conviction, based on my reading of the Bible, that I should wait until I was properly married before God, family and friends before sleeping with the woman who would be my wife. Now it seemed irresistible force (my attraction to Judi's comely self) had come up against immovable object (my Bible-based moral convictions about not sleeping with anyone I was not married to). That was the ingredients for a collision of train wreck proportions. I feared I would bed the beauty before we reached the altar. In her heart and mind, Judi had already committed herself to me. I feared she would take me into her bed with "I do's" still only promised, if I only asked. That meant I had to protect her from me.

So, to protect Judi's good reputation, my own troubled conscience, and the honor of our families and friends--as well as do what was right in the eyes of God--I did what any dolt of a male might have done under similar circumstances. I broke up with Judi because I liked her too much. I know this doesn't make any sense. If I'd read Paul's writings in the Bible a little more carefully, I'd have come up with a more sensible and theologically correct solution. "It is better to marry than to burn with sexual desire..." Paul wrote. Why that most useful bit of Biblical teaching escaped my notice, I do not know. It caused major upheavals in our courtship, however.

Not only did I break up with Judi once, just before Test Week (the time traditionally reserved for students to drop out of Adventist colleges because of the sudden realization that Christ is coming far too soon for them to finish their education), but I did it a second time, a few months later. Both times it was for precisely the same reason: I was drowning. Judi was air. Only, I wasn't supposed to breathe.

Just why the male of the species will turn and run from the very thing he wants and needs most is a wonderment both to womankind and to God Himself, I'll wager. But that's what I did. Judi hinted that eloping was a good option. Her parents had done that after her German Grandpa had sternly forbidden his eldest to marry the girl of his choice on pain of being cut off from all future financial support. They went ahead and got married anyway. In Judi's family, elopement cut the sort of knots that were tying me up, and settled things with the naysayers and non-supporters. In fact, Judi's Dad had told her he would pay her a thousand dollars cash if she suddenly showed up married.

But I would have none of it. I was determined that I--a soon-to-be preacher of the holy Gospel--was not going off to some sinful city of cardsharps and stage show strutters, like Las Vegas, for a cheap quickie of an "I do" by a guy in an Elvis suit with a three-dollar mail order marrying license. We were going to be married in a church before God and man, by a proper clergy--like my Grandpa Gepford--as befitted a future man of the cloth. Somebody should have taken me out, hung me up on a clothes line, picked up a stout stick, and knocked the holy starch out of my over-stiff, stubborn soul. The unyeilding Swedish blood of my ancestors had congealed somewhere between my ears. I was in way over my heart and head, but I wouldn't budge.

Now I know better. If you love the girl, Elvis is good enough.

Judi and I already decided on everything except the name of our firstborn by this time. We would have two children, healthy or sick, boys or girls--and no more. I'd already visited her parents' home shortly after I broke their little girl's heart, blasting it to bits by bowing out of her life briefly just before test week, thus destroying her concentration on the studies her parents were paying good money to have her attend to.

Judi's Father seemed a formidable Kodiak bear in his cave to one callow youth come seeking his firstborn daughter's hand in marriage. I drove to her parents' place that first home leave from college in my old heap of a car, with the vinyl top torn off in chunks and the door wired shut where a close-passing truck had nearly ripped it from its hinges. Judi's Dad's and brother's cars were pricey, and spotlessly maintained. It shows how much I attend to automotive matters to say I can neither recall the make of my own car back then, nor any of theirs. In fact, I have to go look up the make and year of the car I've been driving for the past two years when I take it in for an oil change. As for Judi's car, it was a sporty little beauty like herself--though I don't recall its particular make either. Just driving in at the Ammon residence, I was already out of my league. But I didn't have enough sense to perceive that fact. Ignorance can sometimes pass for courage.

When I met Judi's father, he was so polite ice sickles froze on the dripping eaves. I'd just broke his little girl's heart a week ago, and now I was showing up at her door? The man who potentially would be my future father-in-law took one look at me and my junker of a car, and decided he needed to do something to secure his daughter's safety. She'd be riding around with me in that thing. Earlier, back at college, we got called out of a Saturday night movie by the campus police. They'd spotted my car, and thought someone had broken into it. I assured them that was how it always looked, and they needn't worry. They went off in the dark with their flashlight, shaking their heads in amazement.

So Judi's father and brothers began plotting to fix my car's door, while I took the family's Crown Jewel Cutie down to see a cave carved into a bank of nearby White River. The sandstone cave complex was located beneath the roots of a great old maple tree, down a half-mile long steep slope just across the highway from Auburn Adventist Academy, not far from her parents' home. I wanted to show Judi that cave and do a bit of boasting about how I'd scared the campus bully and his gang years before, back around the time we’d first met.

That bragging rights trip to the cave with the Big Bear's daughter didn't work out so well.

I'd been raised running the steep canyon sides off the end of my Grandpa's farm up on Ham Hill, in Centralia from practically the time I could walk. We slid down hills this steep in Grandma's laundry basket for fun when I was three or four years old. Judi's father, on the other hand, had never let his little girl step off the sidewalk. Our differing life experiences soon manifested themselves. Judi's feet went out from under her, and she headed downslope for White River hundreds of feet below on the seat of her jeans.

I was astonished someone would actually do something like that on a mere trail--rather than hanging from the side of a cliff, or sliding down the outer branches of a fir tree forty feet in the air. I stood and stared after my rapidly descending True Love. She tobogganed, sans tobaggon, down the admittedly steepish slope. I recovered enough to race down the hill after her by the time she stuck out her hand, caught a small passing tree, and swung around to slam into the trunk of the larger one beside it. If Judi hadn't taken the precaution of rescuing herself, she would have ended up several hundred feet further down the slope in the White River itself. When I came to where she was clinging to the tree, I held her close as hard as I could and said, "I thought I had lost you!" Scared me half to death. Her, too. She might have died, or been injured badly.

I brought Judi home again, smeared with mud, and limping. Her Momma took her into the bedroom, shut the door, and got a look at the great purple bruise on her daughter's shapely rear end. Now I had had an affinity for that particular rear end from the first time I followed it down the hall as a Freshman in high school. But a bruise the side of a dinner plate was no way to decorate it. Between my crippled junker in the drive among the gleaming power rides, and nearly losing the Joy of the House in the local river, I was on pretty much every Ammon's bovine excrement list there for a while. Judi didn't do hillsides. I didn't do sidewalks. Was this really going to work out?

Fortunately, my future father-in-law developed a remarkable deal of personal discipline working his way from mail room flunkie to one of the top executive positions in the huge Boeing airplane and space craft company. You don't have hundreds of highly skilled people working under you in multiple locations, access to top secret "Black Box" projects for the US military complex, and the ear of Congress when you testify in government hearings without having learned a thing or two about dealing with how you feel in any particular situation--and doing the right thing anyway. Even if that situation involves your little girl and a frizzy-headed college kid who plainly isn't up to the task of taking care of her properly. My father-in-law's life work helped bring down the Evil Empire during the Cold War. Security and safety for one of the world’s contending superpowers was his passion. And I couldn't take his little girl on a walk without nearly killing her.

As for my family, my Dad gave Judi the thumbs up the first time he met her--and he was ever a man of keen discernment when it came to judging character. My Mom had inadvertently seen a song I'd written for Judi the home leave before. She was greatly interested in meeting the girl that was making her son have those kinds of feelings. It was called "I'm Hugging My Pillow and Wishing That It Was You". (I found out later, a group called "The Ink Spots" had recorded another song by the same title back when my Mom was a girl.) The lyric expressed my ardent interest in the person of this new and unknown leading lady in my life. Mom met Judi through my eyes and feelings in the song I wrote before she met her in person. As my Mom is musically-inclined, that was probably the best thing that could have happened. As for my older brother, John, I saw myself grow a good two feet taller in his estimation the moment he learned I was actually dating Judi Ammon. My little sister, Ingrid, was the one who phoned me to let me know Judi was on campus just before we met. My people were in her corner.

We went back to college again. But all was not well, even yet. I broke up with Judi again a month or two later, for the same reasons as before. I wanted to bed her so badly that if I didn't exit her proximity promptly without looking back, it was simply going to happen right there on the floor with God and the angels looking. So I informed Judi I felt we needed to put some distance between us to consider our relationship. I drove my old beater over to the coast that Sunday, and sat on a big rock looking down at brown cows munching green grass. I wondered why God in His blue sky seemed about as pleased with me as Judi's Dad had been as I sat there pondering life and trying to pray. Finally, I drove back to campus. When I walked into my dorm room, the phone rang. It was Judi. "I've just had my fiancée break up with me," she told me, her voice trembling and tearful. "I'm all alone down here. I need a friend." I said, "I'll be right over." So ended engagement trail separation number two, less than twelve hours after it started.

A few more months passed. I'd already gotten advice from my Dad during the Christmas break about buying Judi an engagement watch--which in Adventist circles at the time, served in place of an engagement ring. I had the money set aside. But I still hadn't officially popped the question, and the frustration of wanting to sleep with Judi, but having my conscience forbid me, was heating up to fever pitch again. Finally one night, I called her on the phone. "I've got to talk to you about something important," I informed her grimly. I drove over to her upstairs loft that I'd filled with wild flowers and love notes one day not long before when she was away at work.

From the tone of my voice, Judi feared the worst. Was this the third and final time I was going to exit her life after giving every possible indication that I was extremely attracted to her? She had cause to be concerned. I truly did not know, walking up the wooden steps to her little loft, whether I was going to break up with her for good, or ask her to marry me. I hadn't a clue. My heart and my brain were on opposite continents somewhere. My feverish body was tossed on the stormy seas between. My future and hers was teetering in the balance, and the slightest breeze could tip me either direction.

When I came through the door, Judi took my arm and said, "Sit here on the sofa. I won't hear anything you have to say until I've made us something to eat." I don't recall what she fixed for me that night. I know it wasn't Little Cherry Pies, but it was something equivalent. After I'd eaten some lady-cooked comfort food, my mind was a good deal clearer. My heart and my head were finally coming into alignment, now that my hunger had been eased. How can you break up with a beauty after she's just fed you? I couldn't. Judi already had my heart. Now she had my stomach, too. My brain finally kicked in as it should have done months earlier. Sitting there on her sofa in that little upstairs loft with the restroom with no door, I asked her to marry me. Why she said "yes", I really don't know. I thank God for women who have the patience to lead their men gently in matters of the heart. If they didn't feed us those Little Cherry Pies, we guys would starve ourselves to death, drooling.

Here's the slightly transmorgified story of the night I asked Judi to marry me in the altered setting of an old time Pie Social picnic, where a man purchased the food a woman had prepared at a community auction for the purpose, and was permitted her company in the bargain. That's the sort of a thing that would have happened back around the time my Grandpa was courting my Grandma...

Little Cherry Pies

She fed me little cherry pies
On her picnic blanket--
With daisies smiling all around,
And the cool brook bubbling low.
She fed me little cherry pies,
Made with her slim fingers.
She stroked my head upon her lap,
Where the fragrant wild rose grows.

She fed me little cherry pies,
As I kissed her fingers--
And praised the pretty freckles
Sprinkled on her nose.
She fed me little cherry pies,
While bumble bees were fumbling
Sweet nectar from the clover,
And clouds came drifting slow.

There's no cherry half as sweet
As my Maggie's kisses.
Her tender skin is softer far
Than the petals of the rose.
A glory of bright butterflies
Came dancing through our meadow.
I sipped her huckleberry wine,
Where tiger lilies grow.

She fed me little cherry pies
From her picnic basket--
With daisies dancing all around,
And the cool brook laughing low.
There she promised she'd be mine--
Mine, and mine forever.
She fed me little cherry pies
Where the fragrant wild rose grows.

c2009 Skip Johnson
All rights reserved