From Wit’s End

Well, things were looking mighty good, so I went to their house that Saturday. When I arrived, Leanne’s mom asked me how the drive was. I was inspired; I answered: “Well, it’s a pity. There’s not much to see between here and Columbia. Just a lot of pine trees, mostly. But I kept seeing these strange protest signs all along the way.” She took the bait: “Protest signs?” “Yeah,” I answered, “All these funny bright orange protest signs that said ‘END CONSTRUCTION’!” (Rim Shot)

The day went well. We played chess and walked about the countryside talking about all manner of things. I took pictures using the digital camera I had bought for the previous weekend. There was a bit of awkwardness when things regarding her past life were brought up, but I figured patience was the best policy. We had a most pleasant dinner with the whole family, and I took the opportunity to invite them all to my church for the next weekend, when the choir would be singing the Easter portion of the Messiah. We sung a few hymns out of the “Sacred Harp” Shape-Note songbook after the dishes were cleared, as was the family custom.

Having a acquired a bit of an affection for Leanne, and having a desire to do things properly, after dinner that evening i drew her father into the study and asked him if i could court his daughter. He said “No”, because i believed in “sprinkling babies”, covenant theology, and didn’t believe in the exclusive use of the KJV. We discussed that bit of foolishness for a few minutes, and I said I was sure there was a solution to the disagreement that would work out to the satisfaction of everybody’s consciences. Then, in a most confusing turnabout, he said i was welcome back if i wished to visit again. I left the house in a great state of perplexity. As i drove home to Columbia, in the dark i picked out one of the tapes in the holder between the seats to listen to on the way home, and just happened to pick out a particular tape of the radio show "Thistle & Shamrock", which just happened to be about all different aspects of love, courtship and heartbreak. The clock rolled to 12:01am, and it was officially April Fool’s day.

We flew back from Arizona on March 7th. While I zipped through Josh Harris’s new book “Boy meets Girl” on the flight home, I had to get up and walk around on the airplane because of strange sluggish circulation feelings in my legs.

Later in the middle of March, I was in the house and the phone rang. I hurried to answer it, and I slipped on some water that was spilled around the dog’s dish. The end joint of my right pinky finger jammed into the wall as I caught myself, and the rest of the inertia went into my calves as they slipped and skidded on the wet floor, and they got a bit pulled. The phone was for me, but it was just a pre-recorded message from the doctor’s office reminding me that I had an appointment later that week. I wrapped a bag of frozen peas around my pinky and walked stiffly to my computer to e-mail Leanne.

Well, my pinky was at first achy, and then stiff, but in about a day it was back to normal. But over the next few weeks, my legs had only begun to bother me. To this day i’m not absolutely sure which of these two incidents contributed to my leg trouble that gradually grew over the rest of the year, or if indeed either of them had anything to do with the onset of Restless Leg Syndrome. I’ve done a bit of reading up about it on the internet, and nobody is really sure what causes it, which is why it’s called a “syndrome”. In some people it can be trauma-induced, some think it’s caused by iron-deficiency or malnutrition, and in others it just shows up in old age or in my case as early as one’s mid-twenties. However I got it, it was to prove to be one of a few factors that conspired against any kind of healthy sleep patterns for me for the rest of the year.

In late March, she invited me to meet her and her family at a Shape-Note Singing the next Saturday in Carrollton, GA (west of Atlanta). Shape-Notes are an old style of musical notation that originated in the Appalachian mountains that make it easy to learn to sing in open harmony. We sung, had a potluck lunch downstairs, and then sung some more. Afterwards I was invited to Grandma’s house on the other side of Atlanta, and i hit it off with the family pretty well. As I sat there in the living room of a perfect stranger, talking to people who were all related to each other and didn’t know me from Adam, the title of the next poem I knew I was going to write came to me: “How did I get here?” (That phrase planted the seed of a poem in my head that germinated over the course of the next few months.) The parents invited me to their house on the outskirts of Greenville, SC for the next Saturday.

One of the other reasons I didn’t sleep all that well for the first half of the year was that I was typing a whole lot. Leanne and I were corresponding in a fast and furious fashion. All throughout February and March not very many days went by that didn’t have e-mail flowing both ways in a free and generous manner. Along with all the activities I was involved with in the evenings, I would come home and sit at my computer and respond to her latest e-mail, many nights staying up until midnight to finish entering my responses and questions.

As time went by we found we had an extraordinary amount of thoughts, feelings, and incidental interests in common. During the course of this ongoing conversation, a few minor theological differences popped up– she was a Baptist, I was a Presbyterian; she considered the King James translation of the Bible to be the only valid translation, and I believed that there were many translations of the Bible that could be profitably used, though were all imperfect relative to the original languages. For a few minutes these differences gave me pause, but she was a most engaging conversationalist and we got along so well, I put these qualms on the back burner and concentrated on being friendly and getting to know her better. Eventually I learned that I was one of about 500 replies to her ad that she had received, and after about two months, i was one of only a few left that she was still writing to.

My birthday was a happy one, because I finally finished the Spring 2001 edition of my newsletter, and handed it out to all sorts of friends in the greater Columbia area, and made the copies for all of you out there in newsletter-land, though I didn’t make time to send them out until the summer, and you will now understand why…

On the last day of February, We flew out to Phoenix, Arizona to meet just about all of my mom’s family to celebrate her mom’s birthday and her parent’s 50th anniversary. We were there about a week, and it was a most pleasant and relaxing time. We spent the daytime relaxing around the house, looking at old photos, and I even studied logic problems in preparation for my 2nd attempt at the GRE. Every evening about a dozen of us would sit down to dinner all together, and my teenage cousin Sarah observed that it was like something out of “the Walton’s”. One day, we visited the >Desert Botanical Garden just outside of Phoenix, which proved to be most inspirational to my artistic endeavors, and the pages of my sketchpad veritably exploded with all sorts of genetic branching patterns, one of which was on the back of this year’s newsletter, and which is also on this site.