Things at home were pretty volatile. In retrospect, I know that it was because my parents were worried about me. At the time, though, I felt so alone, and like I'd only be truly acceptable if I behaved a certain way. That made my soul ache. I remember being called at work, hung up on, threatened with having my keys to the apartment taken from me, told that I was no longer welcome there . . . and, most damaging of all, "You are on your way to becoming spiritually dead. I'm a Christian soldier. I've endured the loss of one child, and I will go on without you." In my mind, I was just a teenager trying to figure out my first relationship (with a VERY late start, at that, since I didn't have permission to date until I was 18 when I would have been almost at the end of my second year in college having attended community college the year before). Needless to say, I welcomed a break from all of that stress.
I had written a letter to my friend, AV . . . we had met at SEP Camp in Minnesota a few years before and I wondered how she was. When she wrote back, she shared that so much had changed in her life. She was married, had a son, and was about to move to New Mexico. She was having a going away party and wanted me to come. I headed out to New Jersey like the Road Runner.
It was really great catching up with her (I was in desperate need of someone my age to talk to about my relationship troubles), playing with her son, and we went to church in Jersey City together. It was Youth Day, which meant that the teens were ushers and responsible for the sermonette (mini-sermon before the sermon). I was a little distracted playing with the baby as the sermonette speaker was announced, and when I looked up, I saw Dishon. I leaned over to AV and asked, "Who is he?" I listened intently to Dishon talk about Romans 8:31 . . . If God is for us, who can be against us? Hmm . . .As we were leaving, Dishon was standing with a group of young people, and I found out that he would be at AV's going away party that night. Yes! As AV and I talked, she told me more about Dishon, and I learned that he was the younger brother of someone I already knew. His sister was married to the son of one of the Local Elders at my church in Brooklyn, and I already knew his niece and nephew as well from when they'd visit our church.
One of the main things I remember from the party is watching Dishon interact with people - he smiled and laughed so easily, was clearly well-liked, witty, and very handsome. I tried not to look over in his direction too much. I wasn't really successful. We played Killer Wink - a game where you sit around in a circle and someone is the "killer." You keep looking around and try not to get winked at by the killer. If you are winked at, you'd be dead, but you couldn't say who killed you. Pretty fun.
At one point in the evening, Dishon and I sat down and talked. He knew people at my school because he met them when he had gone to SEP Camp as a high school worker (the camp was staffed by students from my college). "Do you know (the guy I was dating)?" he asked. My heart dropped. "Yes, I'm going out with him now." I remember thinking, "Why did I just SAY that?" Turns out he already suspected that (he had met the guy I was dating when they were both at SEP Camp the previous summer), and wanted to see if I'd be honest with him. I was, and the conversation ended.
When I got back to school, the relationship I was in did end, which is a pretty challenging thing to go through at a small school, and because we were a part of a close-knit group of four girls and four guys who were dating (there were two sets of siblings in the group, and the remaining three couples ended up getting married). What made it a bit easier, though, was that reminders of Dishon were EVERYWHERE! An article about him was published in our national youth newsletter, and it listed so many interesting things about him . . . he was headed to Harvard, he was the captain of the track team and record-breaking track star, president of the National Honor Society and the band, captain of the basketball and soccer teams, captain of the debate team and he started a multicultural club. Impressive! I mentioned him to a friend, and he talked about how much he loved Dishon. He had met him at a fall festival in Jamaica, and was so impressed by Dishon's humility because Dishon told him he was going to college "in the Boston area." Another friend met him at camp and had a poem Dishon had written. A good friend of mine (SK) had a picture with him at camp that summer on her desk in our study. I had to get back in touch with him.
At this point, I no longer worked in the kitchen. I think I was an Administrative Assistant for Shipping and Receiving after being the first person to ever resign from the work study program (one of my supervisors in the kitchen was giving me a hard time for not working when I was sick. He told me that I should come into work, and just put a hand towel over my shoulder, and cough into it when I needed to. I told my parents, and that was the end of that . . . but then they reassigned me). SK told me that she would let me put a letter in with her letter to him if I did kitchen duty with her (we were Sabbath observers, and since the kitchen was largely staffed with students who weren't allowed to work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the kitchen was run by "volunteers"). It's funny to think how this story would have gone if we had email at that point. I wanted to be back in touch with Dishon, so I sucked it up. I'm sure SK would've sent the letter for me anyway if I really wanted her to, and doing kitchen duty with her was not so bad at all, since she was, and still is one of my absolute favorite people.
To this day, Dishon is not much of a letter writer. He never responded to that letter (I sent it in mid-fall, I think). I'm a pretty determined person, though, so in January 1994, I called Cambridge for Harvard's number (this was before cell phones), called Harvard and got the phone number to Dishon's dorm (I was surprised that they gave it to me!), and called his dorm. His answering machine picked up, and I left a message. He called me back, and things were a bit rocky at first . . . understandably so because we were young, I was in Big Sandy, Texas, and he was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We started spending time together that summer when we were both home from school and our amazing
love story began.Since my novel will be a love story, I absolutely need to be able to write about how the characters grow to love one another. Dishon and I will celebrate our 20th anniversary on May 24th this year in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I am so thankful that I have my own beautiful experience to call upon when I write about love.
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