Mostly About Ginny

When Ginny undressed at the cardiologist’s office for her exam Tuesday, some vile rascal stole her bra.

I tried to convince her that it was either the EKG technician or Dr. Stray himself that took the garment but in a fit of giggles, she fished it out of my pocket.

That’s the trouble of being married to the same woman for close to 39 years, she knows me all too well.

Her heart murmur turned out to be nothing significant — “May not develop into anything for a number of years,” Dr. Stray said. Nevertheless, the waiting time, hospital parking, and tension about the exam depleted us both.

However, the day spent around the hospital gave us a chance to talk and remember happy days.

At breakfast, we reflected that it was probably 40 years ago this month that we first met.

I have to use the word probably because neither one of us can remember first meeting the other. We came to know eachother gradually and are still getting acquainted. For us, it was definitely not a case of love at first sight.

We were each part of a young people’s group at a church serving the poor during the riots of the late 1960s. I think Ginny was a member of that church; I wasn’t.

After a day of doing soup kitchen sort of service, one evening eight or ten of the group went out for burgers. Happenstance seated this quite girl next to me. I began drawing stick figures on my paper place mat. Without a word, she took a pencil out of her purse and began adding to my doodles.

Here’s a photo, taken in 1967 or ‘68, of that brazen young woman who drew stickmen on my placemat:

We’d both been active in the group for months without having previously noticed eachother. Once we finally became aware of the other’s presence, things took off.

My first marriage had failed. So when I met Ginny I was definitely seriously damaged goods, an emotional basket case. That this young lady could see anything worthwhile in me at all amazed me. I still can’t understand what she sees in me; that’s a continuing source of wonder.

Ginny sewed her own wedding dress:

I took a job as an over-the-road truck driver. During months of good weather Ginny traveled with me and we toured the nation living three feet apart 24 hours a day. We learned how to maintain private spaces in the midst of togetherness.

We learned to say, “I love you forever, but I can’t stand you right this minute”.

We visited museums, attended rodeos, joined street dances, visited national parks, read poetry in barren warehouse parking lots and worked and worked and worked.

Once a government inspector hassled me about a minor detail in some shipping manifests. I tried to placate the man but he grew more and more abusive until… Ginny came out of the truck brandishing a broom and chased the tyrant to his car threatening to jam it in an unpleasant place. He fled in terror.

“Good Heavens! I’ve married Boadicea! A real harpy!,” I thought. Never have I seen such pure wrath. Where is that quiet, gentle girl I married?

Ginny has a keen sense of right… and she is a mite protective of me.

Here’s a photo of her with a puffball in Montana back around 1970:

During the foul weather of winter months, Ginny stayed in an apartment here in Jacksonville while I continued working on the road.

This led to problems.

One vile winter I ended up with a shipment in Colorado Springs. Stuck over a snowy freezing weekend, I wandered aimlessly downtown. A young woman accosted me asking if I wanted a “date”, the popular euphemism among prostitutes back then.

I felt really flattered.

“Thank you, but no, Mam,” I said reluctantly.

“Are your sure?” she said with an alluring smile.

I was not at all sure. This woman incredibly appealed to me; seldom in my whole life have I felt desire surge so strong, such a pull of temptation.

My Christian faith did not save me.

My love for Ginny did not save me.

My virtue did not save me.

What saved me from taking that lady back to my motel room was the fact that some of her friends happened by and she went off with them leaving me alone and frustrated in the falling snow.

Later that evening I called Ginny (boy did we have long distance phone bills back then!) and we talked over what had almost happened. She revealed that the previous week she had experienced the same kind of temptation when she met a young sailor in the park across from the library. She said that apart from the timely arrival of her bus, she might have been more receptive to his advances.

It’s interesting that though two thousand miles apart, we had each been tempted at almost the same time and in the same manner with the same result.

As we talked on the phone we realized that neither of us had the strength to remain faithful while we were physically separated. We agreed that I should either quit the road or that we should agree to having outside affairs.

We chose to be together.

At enormous financial loss, I sold my truck and returned to Jacksonville. Leaving the trucking business left us with tremendous debt. We lost the house we were buying. I had no job. We had a new baby. We had no prospects. No hope. No future.

But, we were together… and joyous.

In our devotions then, a Scripture from the Prophet Jeremiah impressed us and we have been aware of that verse ever since:

“’I know the plans I have for you,’ saith the Lord. ‘They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a hope and a future’”.

I entered college again working odd jobs at night. Took me eight years to get my degree only to find a liberal arts degree from a non accredited college was virtually worthless as far as earning a living is concerned.

But college seemed like a good idea at the time.

During those years, Ginny defined her role as wife and mother by giving me her unwavering support in my endeavors. Besides raising our four children and one of my sons from my previous marriage, she took in dozens of neighborhood kids to feed as an act or pure charity.

Her charities are boundless. I recall her bringing home people she found crying at the bus stop to feed, comfort and consol. Once on a vicious cold winter night, I saw her strip blankets from her own bed to take to a poor family without heat.

I’m not very good at earning cash. Even as I worked at various jobs, we lived in HUD housing and received food stamps to survive ourselves. Yet Ginny continued to serve the poorer-than-us by collecting clothing for rescue missions and serving food in soup kitchens, etc.

Ginny felt we have a gift of helps. Not that we had much to share with the poor, but she would see someone with a need, then see someone else who had the needed item, and she’d bring the two together whose paths may not otherwise have crossed.

The gift of helps is an odd gift.

Once when we had no food for the kids breakfast, she and I woke in the small hours of the morning to collect beer cans from a baseball park to sell to a recycle center to buy breakfast for about eight children who came to our house to eat on their way to school.

While in college I’d worked nights at a job with the local mosquito control board; I stayed at this job for ten years growing mosquitoes for test purposes. A budget cutback caused 18 of us to be fired.

Not much of a demand for a man who knows how to grow mosquitoes. I could not find another job anywhere.

On speculation, I wrote a magazine article about coping with unemployment — but we were so broke, I could not buy postage to mail the manuscript to a publisher.

When Ginny was a little girl, she collected stamps.

Because she believed in what I was doing, Ginny went through the pages of her stamp album and removed mint stamps that were over 20 years old. She used those old stamps from her collection to mail out my first attempts at writing.

A few of my magazine articles began to sell here and there now and then on a hit or miss basis. No steady income at all. I was ready to give up even trying to write.

Ginny encouraged me to continue.

But I was making so few sales that we were dying on the vine. I decided to give up writing and get a real job. As I showered for a job interview, Ginny knocked on the bathroom door and came in.

“John, there’s a man on the front porch. He says he’s a newspaper reporter. He wants to interview us for an article”.

Months before I’d written a magazine article about finding a mattress in the middle of the main street bridge. This woman in Ohio read the article. She liked it and called her son, who was a newspaper reporter here in Jacksonville.

That was him on the porch.

He’d tried to call but we had no telephone so he just showed up on our doorstep.

During the interview, he decided to recommend me for a job at the newspaper where he worked. After talking with the editor several times, he reluctantly hired me — not as a writer but as a mail clerk. I worked at the paper ten years as our children grew up.

While our older kids were in college they brought home dozens of foreign students to stay at our house. Students from Israel and Arabia at the same time, students from Haiti and Nigeria and Romania and France and I can’t remember where all else stayed at our home every vacation. Ginny fed and washed clothes and mothered them all.

By now our youngest was a teen and Ginny decided to go back to college herself (A different college from the ones our kids had attended).

I’m especially proud that she enrolled in a learn-to-swim class because she had always been deathly afraid of the water. But she conquered her fear and passed that class.

She earned her degree in banking and finance with a minor in accounting.

But, instead of entering the banking field, she felt called to work for a non-profit charity where she is on a team feeding thousands of hungry children, providing scholarships, sending kids to camp, and supporting poor families.

Aside from her work, she continues to do all sorts of silent charitable things unknown even by her husband. Occasionally I’ll notice some strange entry in our check book and when I ask her about it she’ll say, “Just a little something for the Lord’s work; don’t worry about it”.

Here’s a photo of her making out checks in her sewing room:

Primarily because of her thrift and good management we now own our own home with a pool and lovely garden, and Bill Gates himself did not enjoy a better supper last night than I did. Ginny’s financial acumen enabled me to stop outside jobs and devote my full time attention to writing books. And, with the help of our grown children, we are in the beginning slow stages of establishing our own publishing enterprise.

Ginny is not vocal about her devotion to Christ. Yet once at an office party, her boss approached me and said, “Virginia just quietly goes about her work. She hardly ever says anything. But nobody, even strangers, can be in that office for five minutes without knowing they’re in the presence of a Christian”.

I could write more and more about her. She fascinates me.

Ginny is the best thing that ever happened to me.

She’s lots more fun than an adding machine!

So, Tuesday morning Dr. Stray said there’s nothing wrong with her heart.

I could have told him that.

Can you believe that she will turn 60 next month?