Nancy and I got married on New Year’s Eve, 1975. It took us a few years to figure out why the restaurants were always so crowded on our anniversary dates.
But because we got married New Year’s Eve, that being the case, we will be marking our 49th anniversary in just a few weeks. And yes, we do recognize the mathematical implications of this for next year. Fifty years of marriage does seem like kind of a lot for people as young as we are.
And now, with your permission, I think I am going to share with you how we got together.
I was off in the Navy (1971-1975) in the submarine service. The last two years of this I was stationed out of Norfolk on a fast attack, the USS Ray (653). For a number of reasons, being unmarried was getting to be really tedious for me and I was starting to think that post-Navy would be a good time to get married. The only difficulty was a shortage of prospects. Yes, that was the only difficulty. If we had some ham, we could make a ham and cheese sandwich, if we had some cheese. Somewhere in this time period, I was talking with my mother on the phone and she said something like, “Well, I don’t care what kind of a girl you bring home, so long as it’s a girl like Nancy Greensides.” She said that, and I thought something like huh, and filed it away.
Nancy had grown up in a God-fearing home, but not an evangelical home. Her father was a career bomber pilot in the Air Force, and they were “Protestants” in the military chapel system. She had lived on various bases, from Germany to Michigan, and her father got out as Vietnam was heating up. He had fought through WW2 and Korea, and thought that three wars was pushing it. They located in Texas for a time, and then after Nancy graduated from high school there, they all moved to Idaho. As a newly established Idaho resident, Nancy came to the University of Idaho here in Moscow, where she majored in English Lit. She came to Christ her junior year through a series of interesting circumstances, and because she needed to go down to the Crossroads Bookstore to get a Bible, through another series of events, she wound up connected to my folks. My father was the manager at Crossroads.
During her senior year, my father asked her what she was going to do. No idea, was her reply. Get a job or something. He then told her she had three options, and she was all ears. He said you could get married. Nope, there’s nobody. He said you could teach. No, was the reply. The last thing she wanted to do was teach. Long story there, with the irony unfolding later on. She is a fantastic teacher. Or, he concluded, you could go on Inter Varsity staff. The problem was that she had not been a Christian all that long, and staff members needed to be more established in the faith. But my father knew people with IVF, and they agreed that she could come on staff with them half time if she also came on staff part time with my father’s literature ministry at Crossroads. And so the deal was made.
The next summer, after she had graduated, I was home on leave, with one year left to go in the Navy. Nancy was up in Coeur d’Alene with her folks, but drove down to Moscow one day to firm up her job at Crossroads in the fall. And so it was that we met in the living room at my parents’ house. I discovered later that my mother had very decided views on the shirt I was wearing at the time, and those views were not entirely positive. It was not a shirt calculated to impress.
Because Nancy was coming on staff, and because I was a single sailor and already supporting three other Christian workers, I had the natural opportunity to just add Nancy to the list. This was done, I must confess, with a certain element of guile because it gave me a good excuse to write to her when I would send the monthly check. It was ministry support, you know, and we would write back and forth about ministry—hers in the bookstore, and mine on the submarine. Having met her, I had been really impressed with her, and my mother’s previous comment on the phone made really good sense.
So I got out of the Navy a year later, the following August, having been corresponding with Nancy—in quite a high-minded fashion—for a year. We were already an item in my thinking, and the only thing needful was to bring her up to speed. She would need to be informed at some point, of course. I knew that. I got out in August, and was due to start my undergraduate studies in philosophy at the UI that fall. But during my free time before school started, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to volunteer at the bookstore.
The bookstore was being remodeled, and so there I was one evening, helping out with the painting. There was one section of wall that was particularly challenging, such that it required two painters to be working on it at the same time. You know, close together. You know how these things are. So there Nancy and I were, painting away, chatting about this and that. And then another young man from the Christian community came in, saw us there, and asked Nancy if she was like to get together some time, and he could show her some slides from his mission trip. Something like that. She said no, graciously enough, but he persisted, asking it in another way. This went back and forth for a bit, with me as a glum spectator.
She finally prevailed with him, and he disappeared out of our story. She then, naturally enough, because the whole thing had been awkward, asked me if I thought she had been too hard on him. And I, naturally enough, thought she hadn’t been hard enough on him, not really, not like she ought to have been, and I unfolded my sentiments on the point. Like a protective brother giving counsel to his sister.
Only I wasn’t a brother doing anything like that, and so my conscience smote me. Or maybe I thought my conscience smote me because that would give me an excuse to talk with her about it.
I almost left out something. Neither of us knew anything about courtship really, but we had both independently come to the conclusion that the dating system was for the birds. We had rejected the old model, but didn’t really have anything to replace it with. So I asked her to go for a walk one evening, and she said yes. She thought she was in trouble or something, and that her boss’s son was going to bring up some deficiency or other. But of course, there were no deficiencies to bring up. The only thing that was going to come up was the subject of a beautiful Christian girl, which I did not regard as a deficiency. I told her that my counsel about that other guy had not been disinterested, that I was interested in her, and that I was not looking for “just a girl friend.” Something like that.
While this had the virtue of honesty, that’s about all that can be said for it. There was nothing really in that for her to respond to, and this dawned on me over the course of the following week. There we both were, suspended, air-drying as we slowly spun. There was nothing for her to do with what I had said except to say oh. This glaring problem dawned on me sometime during that week, and so I asked her to go with me on another walk. Not really believing in half-measures, I proposed, and asked her to marry me.
Up to this point, everything had been friendly enough, and we got along great, but there had been nothing romantic about it. We were both attracted but neither one of us was in love, which gave her something she had to work through. So I proposed that night, two nights later we went on our first date, and the next day—at work, at the store—she agreed to marry me. It was all very friendly, business-like, and awkward. That night we went on our second date, still pretty awkward, at the end of which I kissed her, and everything tumbled into place.
The announcement of our engagement caused something of a stir in our small Christian community because we had not been an item and now, blammo, there we suddenly were. That took some getting used to, and various views were expressed. But once the initial shock had passed, all of that tumbled into place also.
So to summarize, we corresponded for a year, I came back to Moscow in the middle of August, we were engaged by the end of September, and were married in late December. This was in line with the advice I have since given young people on such matters. “If you know what you’re doing, do it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.” Also, as it happens, that same August saw the founding organizational meeting of Christ Church, which Nancy and I both attended, but as unencumbered free agents. This means that Christ Church is also coming up on its fiftieth. We will no doubt have some sort of celebration marking that when the time comes, but unlike that first meeting, Nancy will have a pretty good idea what I am about.