When I last left the narrative of my life, Eric and I were speeding along towards the east coast of the United States in March of 1975, stopping at the cheapest motels we could find. (Our resources were limited.) Within a year, I began to write my memoirs, showing how God had orchestrated everything in our life, and I had all the chapters lined up on notebook paper. It was never finished because more life kept happening and getting in the way of the last chapter.
During what I have dubbed “The Honeymoon Days,” life was fairly carefree for Eric and me, as a young couple with two incomes and no kids. Certainly there were some less than joyous occasions, such as the poison ivy Eric encountered in the backyard, but for the most part, we were getting to know each other and learning how to get in sync.
The first thing we had to do was make it to Indiana, where I would finally get to meet Eric’s family. On the way, we stopped at little roadside inns, outside major city limits, because they’re so quaint and most especially, low-cost. We have fond memories of one such stop in South Dakota, where we turned on the shower full force until it filled up the room with a warm fog to reduce some of the March chill, but before we ever stepped foot in the shower, we detected an overpowering scent of rotten eggs – the local water had sulfur in it. I don’t think we stayed. The smell made us gag!
Finally, we pulled up in front of Eric’s home on Union Street in Lafayette, Indiana, a house his dad had built himself. It was situated across the street from a new housing development that had been an open field until Eric’s senior year in high school. Since Eric was the youngest in his family, all his older siblings had already left home. His mom and dad hadn’t been too terribly upset that they had missed our wedding in California since they had only recently seen Eric’s siblings marry ‒ and they weren’t about to get on a plane!
I didn’t understand Eric’s parents much when I met them and it was hard for me to fully grasp that I suddenly had some new family. I mean, they were nice and all, but they seemed to be very, very ordinary. They held a reception for us at their house, where we met other relatives and got some gifts – such as a set of ashtrays. We weren’t sure what to do with the ashtrays, since we didn’t smoke, but we were informed that even if we didn’t smoke, it was courteous to have them out for visitors who did. We also got some new sheets, and that actually was really helpful!
When all the presents had been opened, these relatives settled in for cards and drinks, mostly beer. They had brought their own (BYOB). Since we didn’t drink, smoke, or play cards, we decided to get back on the road again, so the relatives, enveloped in a smoky cloud, looked up briefly to wave goodbye and stayed on long past our departure. It wasn’t really necessary for us to be there for them to have a good time. Eric’s parents humored them - it was rather a family tradition. Hours later, a few of them who hadn’t paid attention wondered aloud what had become of the newlyweds. But our direction wasn’t the same as theirs ...
During the long hours in the car, I watched Eric as he drove. I had met him in October, dated him for a few weeks in November, written him many letters, and then married him in March. The picture in my wallet didn’t have a moustache because he didn’t have a moustache in high school, so I drew a moustache on the plastic sleeve that held the picture. Still, that picture was a straight-on shot, and now I was riding in the passenger seat and seeing his right side in profile. THIS was another aspect of Eric Haley with which I was unfamiliar. So I watched him and memorized him.
When we arrived at Andrews AFB, I reported to the man whose phone number I’d been given. He would be my new boss. He showed us how we could find an adequate apartment by looking in the classified ads. (Yeah, neither of us had done that before!) The cost of living in the D.C. area made our eyes bug out! We ended up in a ground floor one-bedroom unfurnished apartment in District Heights, Maryland. It had a tiny kitchen and living room, a bedroom and a small bathroom, one chair, and large sliding glass doors that led to a common grassy area out back.
We moved in all our combined earthly possessions, including my sleeping bag and bean bag chair, the hope chest, and Eric’s things that he picked up in Indiana on the way: the TV that only turned off when you unplugged it, and a bookcase with one shelf.
The sleeping bag could be fully unzipped and spread out on the bedroom floor, and covered with the new sheets and my fuzzy blankets. Eric knew how to make a lampshade for the one bare lightbulb in our apartment, a globe made with nothing but foam cups and paper clips. The hope chest could be our kitchen table. Eric sat on the one chair that came with the apartment, and I sat on the bean bag chair. Our first home-cooked meal was Chef Boy-ar-Dee spaghetti, along with the standard sliced cucumbers in vinegar. At night, we watched Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons – not much else – snuggled next to each other in my big pink bean bag chair.
As soon as possible, we needed to get some drapes for the glass doors, though, because we were a little exposed, and the one blanket we could spare didn’t really cover them as we would have liked. Our first major purchase was a sewing machine because I told Eric that would be the most practical way for us to get curtains – I would make them. But buying fabric together showed me how different this man was from myself. He was always looking at fabric that was really wild, while I was looking at fabric that looked – well, like drapes. In the end, we finally chose something in a blue and green Polynesian print. It was a little bold, but thick enough to work, and I felt like it was a good compromise.
Both of us had some rough edges when we were first married and very basic, classic immaturity. I was only 18½ and he was just barely 20. There were many things we didn’t know, about marriage in general and about each other specifically. For instance, we learned that I didn’t take kindly to Eric’s overexuberance with winning at Risk. So, we never played Risk. Or Stratego. Or Monopoly. These were all games where the point was to completely wipe out your opponent. We decided to play non-competition collaboration games like jigsaw puzzles instead – that was much safer for newlyweds.
As I learned how different Eric was, I tried to control him and make him more like me. From my Margie-centric worldview, this seemed to be the most logical course of action. There would be fewer conflicts if he were very similar to me. So in the beginning of our marriage, I won arguments by gaining his hand and bending his pinky backward. This was not a good strategy. Nor was it a good strategy for me to listen to him telling a story and correct the details. (“It was a horse.” “It was a mule.” “It was a horse.” “It was a mule!”)
Looking back, I wonder how I could have been so mean to him, but though I couldn’t really understand it at the time, my parents’ marriage was out of order and some of the examples they had been setting for me weren’t the path to success. In the meantime, I was a borderline feminist coming out of the public schools. Heaven help me if I had gone to UCLA!
The first Sunday after we arrived, we looked in the phone book to find a local church, and it looked like Evangel Assembly of God in Camp Springs, Maryland would be a good one, so we decided to check it out. And then, when we walked into the Sunday School class the first week, we heard someone cry out, “ERIC!” It was Iris, from back home in Indiana. We had found the right church!
Our Sunday School teacher was James Gaius Watt, who was the head of the Energy Department under President Ford. Under Ronald Reagan, Jim was promoted to Secretary of the Interior, where he drew fire from the environmentalist crowd because he wanted to use public lands for the good of the public. Jim said he wanted to be remembered as the guy who made sure the toilets flushed. We got an autographed picture from him when he became a star.
Jim was a wonderful teacher, but he also cared about his students, including this young newlywed couple. When he found out we were sleeping on the floor of our unfurnished apartment on a sleeping bag, he was shocked that we had no bed! (At 18 and 20 years old, we thought of it as an adventure!) So he challenged the class to find us some furniture. If someone had a spare bed, or a spare couch, etc., they were to bring it to us. And they did! We had a pretty interesting collection too!
The new (old) couch and the Polynesian print curtains
Being very young, we made good friends among the college-and-career aged youth in the church, and were excited to go to a youth retreat with them. The only problem was, the accommodations at this retreat were men over here and women over there. That was a dilemma for newlyweds ‒ separate quarters were out of the question! Finally someone offered us a U-Haul truck to sleep in and we locked ourselves in for the night for privacy concerns. That would have been fine except that the truck was airtight. In the middle of the night, we awoke, gasping for breath, when somebody thumped on the side of the truck as a joke.
We became fast friends with a young black man named Stan and a large young white man with curly black hair named Dan. They would often spend all evening at our apartment. That gave us a great idea for how we could upgrade our living quarters. Stan and Dan could live with us in a real house and sublease rooms from us upstairs. Not only that, but everybody at church was sure it was a good idea for the two of them to live in this kind of “group home” too, so that we could minister to them if needed. Young as we were, the feeling was that Eric and I would be a good, stabilizing influence on them.
We did find a house for just the right price, at the back side of Andrews, in a quiet neighborhood of beautiful older homes in Clinton – well, quiet except for when a plane flew low directly overhead. But that wasn’t too much of a problem – I loved planes! The house was a lovely Cape Cod, with two rooms upstairs and a bathroom, and another master bedroom downstairs with its own bathroom. We fell in love with the house and called it “Jehovah-Shammah” – the Lord is there.
Dan at Jehovah-Shammah
The four of us formed the nucleus of the singing group I mentioned in my post two weeks ago, Under the Son. Dan had a twelve-string guitar and Stan had a bass. We found or wrote various songs and performed “gigs” at the church. We bought matching outfits and took dramatic shots of our group at Shenandoah National Park. Eric took an old gray footlocker and painted it with a waterfall, a dove, and fire. Then we poked a hole in the back, set our record player in the footlocker with the cord running through the hole, and used it like a console stereo, singing along with our records.
The Holy Spirit trunk
Stan was a clean freak and Dan was not. Dan lost his job and we didn’t want to throw him out but we needed him to find another job to pay the rent and didn’t know how to motivate him. We even tried not feeding him, but he made ketchup sandwiches to tide himself over. Mostly, he just wanted to stay home and invent electronic things in the basement. Stan bought his own rake to use on the freshly-fallen autumn leaves, and after every time of raking, he carefully cleaned the rake, waxed it, and hauled it upstairs to his room, along with his bicycle.
Meanwhile, at work, I was told that even though I had been trained at tech school to program a Burroughs computer, they needed me to program a Honeywell because all the command level computers (like the one at Air Force Systems Command Headquarters) were Honeywells. Back then, computers took up whole rooms and we programmers were not allowed to enter that room nor even to gaze upon the computer itself. Here’s my tech school class posing next to the windows, where you can see those authentic hanging tape drives, and I was sitting at a keypunch machine, though I never did any keypunching. This was the last I ever saw of computers for quite a while.
Programming Specialist Tech School Graduating Class, Sheppard AFB, TX, 1975
So the first thing I had to do was go to school again, only this time I was bussed to a civilian training center in Virginia. And when I learned how to converse in Honeywell, I could do my job – but then I was also eligible to move to Hawaii and program that Pacific Air Command computer too.
After a short while, with me at work and Eric at home doing the laundry like a good househusband, our savings account involuntarily began to dwindle. We just took out a little each week so we would have enough money for our food, gas, and other expenses. But a few quick calculations showed us this couldn’t go on for very long without depleting all our funds. I would miss having him do the laundry, but we had to make sure Eric had a job.
At first, he was employed at a Kresge’s, mostly making all the shelves neat and folding clothes. (Ha! The irony!) Then his next job was working at a company that was building a prototype for a high-tech mobile TACAN system for Iran’s military. This was before the revolution in Iran that overthrew the Shah, and the TACAN is probably a rust pile in the desert now.
Mobile TACAN System by International Technical Products
On the weekends, we loved to take a drive to Shenandoah National Park to look at the autumn leaves, or just take a trip to Upper Marlboro for sightseeing. Someone gave us a beagle puppy. We named her Holly and tied her out back.
A Sweet Puppy Named Holly
We had everything we could want – a house, a car, a dog, a church, a good enough income with the two of us working, two friends to sing with us and do the dishes when I cooked for them, a base commissary where I could get good deals on those food items and other essentials, memorable scenery such as light snow on our azalea and holly bushes, and best of all – each other.
And then, the orders came. I could never figure out why the Air Force wanted to move me from the East Coast of the United States all the way to Hawaii, but that’s what they did. I cried, but there was no getting out of it. We had a farewell concert at the church.
Under the Son, Farewell Concert
Then, we sold everything we could in a yard sale, and the rest was packed up by the movers. In July of 1976, we found ourselves crossing the country, heading west again.
And that is how we spent our honeymoon days. Eric and I were a young, start-up enterprise with big dreams for the future, just enjoying everything about everything. Looking back, and seeing how much we had to learn, I can tell you confidently that the Lord was able to teach it to us little by little, knowing our weaknesses and failures, but also knowing that our hearts were centered on Him as His dear children. He took us where we needed to go, and He has never failed us.
"This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go." ~Joshua 1:8-9
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