We’re coming up on my wife Lynne’s birthday, and I’ve been thinking about our first meeting, falling in love, and the truths about falling and staying in love. Here’s a part of that story connected to a couple of songs I’ve loved for some time now.
September 1970, a week before starting college, the phone rings.
“Hey Mike, it’s Larry. Friday night these two girls from Thailand are going to be in town. One is the great niece of an old crippled woman my dad used to work with at the university, and I think they’ve talked about getting us together for years…”
“You and the crippled gal?”
“No, no…me and the niece from Thailand. Anyway, there’s a dinner at the old lady’s house because her arthritis is so bad she really can’t get around…in fact her ninety-year-old mother takes care of her, and she’ll be there too, and I understand that if she likes you she takes her teeth out.”
“The girl from Thailand?”
“No, the old woman.”
“The one with the arthritis?”
“No, her mother. Wanna come?”
“Larry….I’ve been dreaming of a night like this all my life.”
Larry picked me up about six fifteen. On our way to the blind date of my dreams we created a little code…like signals in baseball. If things went the way I imagined they might I’d do a yawn and a stretch and remind Larry about our “early hike” in the morning (wink, wink), and we’d thank our ancient and infirm hostesses, bow with our hands together to their relatives from the land of the big Buddhas and we’d be at the movies by nine.
We were greeted at the door by a large old woman with false teeth. I probably shouldn’t have noticed that those teeth didn’t seem to fit very comfortably, but I did. I got the feeling the only time she put them in was for church on Sundays or when company called.
“Come on in, boys. I’m Nanny.” When she waved us in her grandma arms flapped proudly, uncovered by her short sleeve dress. “I’ll get the girls”. She left us alone in the entry long enough to practice our signal a couple of times and notice the pictures. There were lots of pictures in that entry. Photos framed and hanging on the walls or perched on antique bookshelves. Several were of military men in uniform, a few of Nanny in Europe with people I did not know, and one high school graduation picture of a green-eyed beauty I couldn’t take my eyes off.
Then, as if by some miracle, the picture in the entry came to life before my very eyes. An American girl in a brown Thai Silk outfit, with a hair-do that had to have been inspired by Ann Margaret in Bye Bye Birdie.
I couldn’t breathe. I lost all control of autonomic nervous system functions. This would have been fine had I simply been paralyzed by her adorableness, but instead I became afflicted with a not so rare disorder young men in the presence of babes often contract known as IOMS…or Impress-o-matic Syndrome.
It’s a sad thing to see, really. A fairly pleasant and normal young man suddenly has an uncontrollable desire to play every piece he’s ever learned on the piano while telling every joke he’s ever heard. Twice. Advanced cases of IOMS have been known to trigger IOMSeizures causing uncontrollable bragging about Pinewood Derby Cars, the number of merit badges received as a Boy Scout and the talent award received in junior high for a performance of Bill Cosby’s routine about Noah and the ark. Personal space is invaded, friends are shoved aside, and in extreme instances, IOMS causes shameless kissing up to old and arthritic ladies. It isn’t pretty.
Everyone who’s ever suffered from a severe case of the syndrome hopes against hope that the one who has ignited the bizarre behavior will know that only their response can administer the cure.
The interesting thing about IOMS is that, like drugs, it can burn itself out and through sheer exhaustion one has to shut down for awhile. It was during one of these periods that I got do discover that I was in the presence of greatness.
The crippled aunt, Louise Browning, was one of the most beloved teachers of social work in the history of the University of Utah. She was wise and witty and wonderful. Wonderful enough to see past the temporary insanity of my IOMS and find something about me worth loving. And her mother, Nanny, was a remarkable woman as well. Not simply because of the way she cared for her daughter, but the way she had of caring for strangers and making them feel comfortable. After I’d played Fur Elise one too many times she put her arm around me, and her teeth in a jar.
As you can certainly imagine, there were no signals given or references made to any “early hikes” the next morning. After dinner Larry and I took the American girls from Thailand on a tour of the town. Intermittently my IOMS would flare up however, and I’d find myself doing the strangest things. At Fendall’s ice cream parlor, I slipped a five dollar bill to the waitress and told her that I was going to “steal” one of the long handled spoons we used to eat our burnt almond fudge malt. Just to prove to you how unbalanced IOMS can make a person, I remembered hearing about a guy who stole a spoon from an ice cream parlor, had it engraved and turned it into a bracelet for his girlfriend, AND I ACTUALLY THOUGHT THIS WAS A COOL IDEA!!!! I’m telling you, IOMS is sick and it’s sad.
I suppose I grabbed at the spoon idea because as the evening wore on I became more and more desperate. I knew I was out of my league with this girl. She was beyond perfect, and once she hit the college campus we’d both be attending she’d be swept away in a New York minute. So I scrambled to find some way to make her need to see me again. When we drove the girls up to the State Capitol so they could see a panoramic view of the city, I finalized my plan.
There were several sunflowers growing wild on the side of the hill, and in a dramatic flare, I grabbed one and wrapped it around the spoon I’d paid for but pretended I’d stolen from the ice cream store. (This is how a goody two shoes guy misguidedly tries to go for the James Dean appeal)
“This sort of sums up our evening together.” I handed her my gift.
“A sunflower wrapped around an ice cream spoon? What does it mean?”
“Next time I see you, I’ll tell you.”
Of course, I had NO idea what it meant. Figured something would come to me. Point was, I HAD to see her again, before she married some hunk in med school, and this was all I could come up with.
A few days later I found myself wandering around campus hoping to run into the only great blind date I would ever know. I thought I saw her on the way to the library, and was about to approach her, but then recoiled and panicked.
What if she asked me about the sunflower and spoon? What was I going to say? I’d have to come up with something, anything, so I wouldn’t be caught in my desperate little web of romantic deception.
Come on, brain, think of something fast. She’s turning this way. Quick, run.
But upon seeing her there I was a deer caught in the headlights. I couldn’t move as she approached. She was wearing a coy, self satisfied smile.
“I figured it out…the spoon and sunflower thing you gave me. I know what it means.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I talked to my great aunt and we saw the creative symbolism in your gift. You see a spoon is a form of measurement, and a sunflower always follows the light and warmth of the sun. And the way we can measure the growth of a friendship is by the light and warmth that grows within us with each new memory we make.”
I stared at her for at least thirty seconds. “How did you know?”
I was in love. And the more I was around her and learned how she felt about things and saw how she treated people, the more I loved her. I tried to impress her by writing her songs, and poetry and taking her to concerts. She responded by listening to the songs, reading the poems and telling me that someday I’d be up on that concert stage, and people would be clapping for me. But the most wonderful thing she did for me was find a way to let me know that I didn’t have to try so hard. Turns out she was plenty impressed and would like it if we could just be ourselves together. This proved to be the truest and finest cure of IOMS known to man.
I married her. Lynne Louise, the reason my heart had a song.
She’s That Girl
She is the sunset that every photographer dreams of finding
She is the moon that brings lovers together at night
She’s a cool breeze on hot summer days
She’s the brush strokes in every Monet and
She’s the girl no one really believes they’ll ever find
But she lives, somewhere in every man’s heart
And every man’s mind
She knows just what to do
She’s too good to be true
I can’t understand
How this girl could be right here next to me
Listen to “She’s That Girl”
Holding my hand.
I continued to be crazy about her in a way many of my associates told me was unsustainable throughout a long marriage. But they said that, I believed, because they obviously were married to lesser women. If they were married to my Lynne their hearts would still race when they got a call from their wife.
My heart stopped racing in 1986. I woke up one morning and it was gone, and I couldn’t will it back. I didn’t care anymore about the person who had meant more to me than anyone or anything on earth. I panicked.
Maybe it was the years of PMS that finally got to me. All men who’ve been married to women who have suffered from industrial strength pre-menstral syndrome never need wonder what it’s like to live polygamy because they already have. Every two weeks a different woman shows up.
Maybe it was stress, maybe it was approaching mid-life crisis. Whatever it was, it was real and it scared me. I got the name of a counselor who had helped a friend of mine so I called for an appointment.
I canceled and rescheduled a bunch of times. Shouldn’t I be able to take care of this myself? I mean, I can’t drill my own teeth or prescribe antibiotics for pneumonia or replace a clogged artery, but this emotional marital disorder should be something I can just work out alone.
But it got worse, and I couldn’t fix the problem alone so finally Lynne and I arrived at the therapist’s office.
“Look, Dr….”
“Call me Ken”
“Okay, Ken, I just want you to know that we’re here because there’s nothing more important to us that this relationship…and it doesn’t matter how much this costs, or how long it takes…We promised that we’d love each other forever, and something’s gone wrong, and so we’ve come for some professional help. Take your time. I understand that things like this don’t change overnight. She’s struggled with PMS for years. Do what you need to do. I’ll be supporting you both, every step of the way. Go ahead: Fix her.”
The therapist just looked at me. He wanted to make sure he’d heard me correctly… “Fix……her?”
I had the feeling he was trying to give me a way out, but I was too big a mess to take it. I just nodded.
“Well, we might get to her in a few………MONTHS!!!!”
Now I was the one trying to make sure I’d heard correctly. Was he referring to me? Me? I was the guy who won awards making commercials about how to stay in love with your wife. I was the guy sensitively wrote songs and brought his PMS-ing woman flowers….I VACUUMED!!!!
“What do you mean, a few months?”
“Look, Michael, seems to me, you’re the one with the problem. You’re the one who can’t feel anything for the woman he’s been crazy about since he was eighteen years old. Maybe it would help to find out why you shut down that part of yourself.”
I started to twitch. It’s never a good thing to twitch in front of a psychologist who reads body language the way most of us read Newsweek.
“What’s the matter Michael? You seem uncomfortable.”
“You think it’ll take months?”
“Who knows. I don’t really believe in spending years and years of a person’s life and taking all their money just to help them find out they were poorly pottie trained. But this may not be something we can fix today.”
“But it CAN be fixed, right?” I needed some reassurance.
“Do you know anything about cars, Michael? In your spare time when you’re not writing songs and writing films or directing commercials, do you, rebuild engines?”
“I can barely tell the difference between the dip stick for the oil and the transmission fluid.”
“So, when you drop off your car to get fixed, you don’t hang around and tell the mechanic what to do while he’s under the hood.”
“No.”
“He’d probably double the price if you did. Well, the same is true here. I’ll tinker a bit under the hood, see what I can find, and let you know. Okay?”
I wondered if shrinks had diagnostic probes I should know about. Turns out they do, only you can’t see them.
The doctor went to work on me. Lynne was with me during most of the sessions. It was a remarkable process. Turns out that the things I was most afraid of facing were not as scary as I imagined when I saw them in the light of truth.
My therapist taught me a great deal through telling me stories, and inviting me to read books that could open my heart and mind to the truth. The guy changed my life and taught me principles that didn’t just save my marriage…it deeply and profoundly enriched it.
As our therapy sessions began I remember calling the children together and telling them that as much as I loved them, they came fifth.
They were terrific people, but they weren’t the most important thing in my life…their mother was, and she and I were going to learn how to love each other better. I didn’t care if the Cub Scouts got a new Weblos leader, or the Sunday School picked a better teacher…didn’t care if they fired me at work, banned me from the studio or the neigborhood branded me as anti social….The first four things on my priority list would be…my wife, their mother, their mother and me and me and their mother. Children came fifth.
They seemed to get it. We didn’t lose them by focusing so keenly on our marriage…in fact, they flourished as we did. The happier mom and dad were with each other, the better they did. Emotional scarring DID NOT take place when we missed a school play or a recital or a ball game. They just told everyone who asked them where their folks were that they were in therapy, and it was okay because they came fifth anyway.
Marriage counseling changed us both along with our definition of love. We just celebrated 28 years of marriage and 32 since that blind date. When the professional therapy ended it seemed fitting and natural to celebrate our journey together with a couple of songs. Deep in my heart I hoped the songs I’d written for my wife would impress her. Turns out, I didn’t need to.
It’s Not Love
He’s counting the hours until he sees her face again
Three hours is a million years he just can’t wait til then
Last night was electric, she knocked him off his feet
He’s been down this road before, he knows this side of the street
With all of heart he believes that it’s love
But somehow he ought to see
It’s not love til it’s been through a storm
It’s not love til it’s died and reborn
It’s not love til it comes to an end
And still you have faith to try once again
Til then…it’s not love
It’s not love just because it feels right
It’s not love until you’ve sacrificed
It’s not love until we’ve healed the hurt
It’s not love til we both make it work
It’s not love til we’ve seen all the flaws
It’s not love til we’ve given our all.
Listen to “It’s Not Love
