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If Houghton College didn’t exist, the town of Houghton, New York would
be about the same size as Thomson, Illinois. For the next two
years, Houghton College would be the place I called home, and after
being away for so long, it felt good to be back in the classroom.
I had always enjoyed school, and this time I even applied myself,
something I did not always do while at Taylor.
The student development program consisted of
twelve classes, including two internships, stretched over four
semesters. I had a 4.0 going into my second year, when I made
one too many errors in writing up my major project proposal.
That and the “B” I received during my fourth semester for failing to
do an optional research paper brought my overall average down to 3.8.
I simply didn’t want to bother with the additional work required for
an “A” in the class. The only difference would have been a tenth
of a grade point in my overall GPA and a boost to my ego. I
figured that my grades were high enough and that I could afford to
live with a little less ego and spend a little more time socializing.
Six of us from Houghton College were enrolled in
the graduate program at Buffalo State College, and we arranged our
classes so that we only had to make the drive to Buffalo once a week.
We would leave Houghton on Monday afternoon; attend a two-and-a-half
hour class starting at 4:45; go to another one at 7:30; spend the
night at Houghton’s extension campus in West Seneca, New York; attend
another class the next night; and then go home to Houghton. Our
schedule made for a long, exhausting two days each week.
A real camaraderie existed among the grad
students from Houghton. Maybe it was the shared experience
during the winter months of braving the elements—the blizzards,
whiteouts, and subzero temperatures—in order to make the
hour-and-a-half trek to Buffalo each week. Perhaps it was the
fact that all of us were enrolled in the same graduate program.
Whatever the reason, most of us became pretty good friends during the
two years that we were at Houghton.
Skip Trudeau was a year ahead of me in Houghton’s
student development program and was residence director of one of the
dormitories on campus. Skip and I sometimes hung out together
during our off hours, and every once in awhile, we ran into each other
in the middle of the day.
“Have you started on that paper for Johnson’s
class?” I asked, one afternoon in the student union.
“I’ve thought about it, but that’s about all I’ve
done. How about you?”
“I started writing a couple of days ago.”
“Goober,” Skip said, with a touch of jealousy in
his voice, “you always start early.”
Why he called me Goober, I’ll never know.
But after pausing for a moment, he said it again.
“Skip,” I protested. “Why are you calling
me ‘Goober’?”
“Goober,” he said, feeling quite proud of
himself. “I kind of like that.”
There must be worse nicknames to have than
“Goober,” but none come to mind. I dreaded the thought of going
through two years of graduate school with the same name that Gomer
Pyle’s cousin had in a television sitcom back in the 1960s. It
was too late, though. Skip already had his mind made up.
The name stuck, and within a couple of days, other people were using
it too.
“Hey, Goober,” another graduate student, Merna,
asked one afternoon while passing me in the hall. “What are you
doing tonight?”
“Just studying,” I said. “The same thing I
do every night.”
“Do you have time to run me to the store?”
“Sure,” I said, not knowing what I was letting
myself get into.
We drove to the Market Basket in Fillmore, about
four miles east of Houghton, for what I thought would be a quick trip
to the grocery store.
“Don’t they have what you need?” I asked.
“I can’t decide which toothbrush to buy.”
It took ten minutes for Merna to find the right
toothbrush because, she said, she wanted the color to match her
bathroom. I did not know that such finicky people existed.
To me, a toothbrush is a toothbrush, and once I’ve decided on the
kind of toothbrush I want, it doesn’t matter whether it’s red, green,
or purple. It did matter to Merna, though. Everything had
to be color-coordinated, right down to her toothbrush matching the
hand towels in the bathroom.
There was something else unusual about Merna,
besides the fact that she bought color-coordinated toothbrushes.
She had the same last name as mine, a coincidence that led to plenty
of confusion during the two years we were at Houghton together.
“I sure would like to meet your wife,” Tom said,
while pushing a broom down the hall of the campus center.
“I would too,” I responded, letting Tom know that
I wasn’t married.
“You mean Merna’s not your wife?”
“Nope.”
“I thought that the two of you were married.”
“Not to my knowledge,” I said, jokingly.
Tom’s mistake was a common one, and Merna and I
grew accustomed to having to explain the nature of our marital
status. The last thing that I needed as a single guy at Houghton
was for everyone to think I was married. It had been a long time
since I had lived on a college campus, and I meant to take advantage
of having access to a campus full of young women.
Looking for a wife is a little like going
fishing. You need the right kind of bait and a lot of patience.
You can have a twenty-pound catfish on the line, but unless you know
how to get fish into the boat, you might as well pack up your gear and
go home. By the time I arrived at Houghton in the fall of 1986,
I knew how to fish. Dating had become a science, and it was one
at which I intended to excel.
I spent the first few months in New York just
getting to know people, but when Steve Brooks asked me to house-sit
during the first weekend in November, things really started cooking.
Steve was Houghton’s head basketball coach, and he needed someone to
look after his dog, the lovable Dr. J., while he and his wife were out
of town for a basketball tournament. I agreed and vowed to make
good use of the house while they were away.
The first thing I did was ask Julie Miller for a
date. Julie was a cheerleader for the basketball team and a
resident assistant in one of the girls’ dorms on campus. I
invited her to watch a movie at Steve’s house that Friday night and to
take a trip over to Big Al’s Pizza afterward. I really liked
Julie and was kind of hoping that things might click between the two
of us. We both liked the movie, Murphy’s Romance, with
James Garner and Sally Field. The pizza, with Canadian bacon and
pineapple, was great. However, the date seemed to fizzle
somewhere between the time I picked Julie up and the time we ordered
our food. I took her home, said goodbye, and knew that would be
my first, last, and only date with Julie Miller.
That was okay, though. The secret to good
fishing is in not giving up. I still had a couple of good movies
left, and the first thing I did on Saturday morning was look around
for someone other than Julie to watch them with. I went over to
Merna’s apartment, told her about Julie, and asked if she knew of
someone who might be interested in watching the movie Amadeus
with me.
“I’m sorry things didn’t go better for you last
night.”
“Thanks,” I said, still a little disappointed
that things hadn’t worked out with Julie.
“I have a paper due on Monday,” Merna added.
“Otherwise, I would watch the movie with you myself.”
“That’s okay,” I said, knowing that she had a lot
of work to do.
“I’ve got an idea! What if I make an
all-hall announcement?” she offered, just before walking out the door,
down the hall, and into the office. “Attention East Hall girls!”
I heard over the public address system. “Anyone interested in
watching the movie Amadeus, please come down to the lounge.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. There must have
been 300 beautiful young women in her dorm, and she was inviting all
of them to watch a movie with me. It was my lucky day!
Three girls came to the lounge after Merna’s
announcement: Tami Tetrault, Sharon Combs, and Randi Mathisen.
They all wanted to watch the movie, and the four of us agreed to meet
at the lounge later that night to go over to Coach Brook’s house.
When I drove back to the dorm a few hours later,
I fully expected to spend the evening with all three girls, but to my
surprise, both Tami and Sharon had found other things to do. That
left Randi.
I didn’t know much about Randi and had met her
only once before. She was a senior psychology major, worked as a
proctor at the East Hall desk, and had been wanting to see the movie
Amadeus for some time. However, she hadn’t planned on
watching it with a guy she hardly knew—me—in the basement of a house
where she had never been before.
For my part, I was interested only in watching a
movie, having a good time, and doing a little bit of laundry.
That’s right. It was laundry night, and I stopped the movie
every thirty minutes or so to go into the other room and throw another
load into the washing machine. Not exactly the thing to do to
impress someone on the first date!
Maybe I wasn’t trying to impress Randi, but Randi
sure impressed me. We hadn’t said more than a couple of words
to each other before that night, and yet after the movie we talked as
though we had been best friends for years. She told me all about
her classes, friends, and family, and I told her all about how I had
ended up at Houghton. One of the first things I wanted to know
was whether or not Randi was seeing anyone. I figured that if I
asked her straight out, I might scare her off, so I told her about my
breakup with Sandy. Sure enough, she followed my lead and told
me about a couple of guys she had dated, but said that currently she
wasn’t seeing anyone. Just what I wanted to hear.
“How would you like to drive up to the school
farm?” I suggested, not wanting the night to end.
Houghton is located in the foothills of the
Allegheny mountains, and on a clear night, you can see for miles and
miles across the valley. The sky was a bit overcast and the
temperature was down around freezing—pretty typical for the beginning
of November in western New York State. But despite the cold
weather, Randi and I were like two kids on summer vacation. We
walked around, looked at the horses, and kept right on talking.
Two days later, I showed up at Randi’s dorm after
dinner and asked if she wanted to go for another drive. She said yes,
and we headed back to the farm. I half expected the spark I had
felt earlier in the week to be gone. It wasn’t, though, and we
picked up exactly where we had left off—talking as if we had been best
friends forever. Before the evening was over, I knew that Randi
was someone I wanted to get to know better. I asked her to go to
the play You Can’t Take It With You the next Friday night, and
once again she accepted my invitation.
“What did you think of the play?” I asked
afterwards, getting ready to say good night.
“I liked it,” Randi said, right before leaning
over and kissing me on the lips. She then jumped out of the car
and headed for the dorm, determined not to give me a chance to say
anything. Amazed, I realized that Randi liked me. She was
interested in more than a platonic friendship with just another guy.
She wanted to date.
Randi had only one semester left before finishing
at Houghton, and I knew that if our relationship was going to go
anywhere, it had to happen soon. That’s why I invited her to
spend part of Christmas vacation with me in Wisconsin, something that
stunned my parents and shocked Randi.
I had everything figured out. I would catch
a ride home from New York with a friend of mine who lived in South
Dakota. Randi would fly to Wisconsin after Christmas and spend
time with me at my parents’ house, and then John would pick us both up
on his way back to Houghton. That’s what we did—well, almost.
I went home for Christmas, and Randi came a couple of days before New
Year’s. The night before we were scheduled to leave, John
called.
“I sold my car, and I am flying back to New
York,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “You and
Randi will have to find another way of getting back to school.”
John had left us stranded with no way of
returning until the following Saturday, six days later, when my
brother, Bill, drove us the 700 miles to Houghton. That was
quite a trip, too. I had lain down in the back seat to get some
sleep and wound up having motion sickness for most of the way to New
York. I’ll spare you the more gruesome details of the trip, but
I will say that on more than one occasion Bill had to pull over so
that I could take a walk alongside the ditch.
Despite the way the week ended, something magical
happened between the time John called and the time Bill drove us to
Houghton a few days later. Randi and I talked nonstop, sharing
everything from our childhood memories to our dreams for the future.
Before the week was over, I told her that I thought I was falling in
love.
Some people have wondered how Randi could have
let herself fall in love with someone with a disability. Of all
the guys in the world, why pick one with cerebral palsy? No one
plans to fall in love—it just happens. I’m not saying that my
cerebral palsy was never an issue for Randi. She did give
serious thought to whether she wanted to date someone with a
disability. But once she made the conscious decision to date me,
it didn’t matter to her whether I was right-handed or left-handed, or
tall or short, or disabled or not. She fell in love with the guy
she was dating, and that was all there was to it.
I don’t want to imply that Randi never had second
thoughts about marrying me—because she did. Her questions never
centered around the issue of my disability, though. Instead,
they had more to do with her own insecurities about marriage itself.
Randi’s parents had divorced when she was seven, and the idea of
marriage scared her. Subconsciously, she assumed that what had
happened to her parents would eventually happen to her, too, and
sometime after we became engaged, Randi started waking up in the
middle of the night, wondering when I would leave her.
I don’t share this to discredit Randi or members
of her family. Rather, I share this to provide insight into the
relationship between Randi and me. Randi did not wrestle with
whether she could marry a man who has cerebral palsy. That was
not the question. Instead, she wrestled with the idea of being
married to a man—who happened to have cerebral palsy—who might leave
her after a few years of marriage. There is a difference, and I
hope that people see that difference. Fears of intimacy, change,
and abandonment are exactly the same fears that all couples wrestle
with when contemplating marriage—not just couples who have a
disability. Marriage scared Randi, but her fears had nothing to
do with my cerebral palsy.
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