First Meeting

Most people that Deb and I know are aware of the recent news of her cancer. People have been following her updates on her blog.  I must tell you that up until a couple of weeks ago I am not sure I knew very much about blogs. But now I am finding a blog to be kind of a nice thing and people have been following her progress and have been responding. It has been one of her favorite things to read the comments and she has been overwhelmed with the care on concern people have shown.  One thing that people might not know is that along with Deb's many attributes comes one of the finest sense of humor you might find. Her laugh is easy and even now she finds herself in moments where the need to laugh reaches a point of hurting her incision. She will often say to us now "do not make me laugh" and then moments later she will have something that strikes her and she just cannot help having that part of her personality come out.

I have to do something now.  A few people know that I like to write. I am so sad about this entire chapter in our lives and I need for therapeutic reasons to record some things. Even if nobody ever reads this I am doing this because I have to. If somebody does read it please know that all the expressions are done out of love.  Deb has always said "Stan, yours eyes see things and your ears hear things that are not normal but they are funny".  So permit me now to relay a few of those thing.  You might find some laughter and if that be the case let it somehow part the clouds that seem to be with us now.

Most of us who are married can recall the first time we met what was to be our new spouse.  For us that meeting came at a bowling ally.  Somehow kids from our denomination of churches would gather a few times each year.  The denomination was Christian Reformed.  It seemed important to the parents that attended Christian Reformed Churches to organize activities where young people could gather and get to know each other.  Of all places this meeting was to take place, it was in Cleveland.  I was 19 years old and my assignment was to drive to Cleveland and take some of the kids from our youth group to this meeting.  I can remember the kids wanted to listen to radio all the way and I remember somehow that they must have played this one song about 40 times on the trip.  To this day the song has made no sense to me. It was "Jeremiah is a Bullfrog".   I never found out how that song might make some sense, but at the same time I can still remember that stupid song.  Another thing has not made all that much sense to me: while it was true that 19 year boys have some predisposition to occasionally glance at members of the opposite sex, it was also true that I have not been all that attracted to the part of the body known as the rear end.  Always been a little bit of a mystery to me as my eyes have always wandered to other spots.  I was however assigned to bowl on a lane and one of the fellow bowlers was a girl who would on that day start to redefine life for me.  I am embarrased to say this but  most of bowling involves looking at the hind ends of people.  As that went on that day and I can remember thinking that this person gave some new definition to how nice a pair of jeans could look on a person.  It was a done deal when she turned around and I saw the smile and as she walked back to the  score table told me to record a strike.  My first words to her were, "Well I would like to do that but you only got nine pins".  She told me to put down a strike anyway because the ball had hit right where she was aiming.  I put down the strike and the rest, as they say, is history.   There was, however, one really big problem.  She was in the ninth grade.  It would be two years before I ever talked with her again and that in itself is a story.  I will tell you about that in a day or so.

Stan the Man