Young Love, Forty years later

Forty years ago today, on June 16, 1972, my parents, Danny and Mary McCain, were joined together in holy matrimony. My parents first set eyes on each other in 1966 when my father was fifteen and my mother was fourteen. My mother had, against her will, been sent with her sisters and brother to a […]

Forty years ago today, on June 16, 1972, my parents, Danny and Mary McCain, were joined together in holy matrimony.

My parents first set eyes on each other in 1966 when my father was fifteen and my mother was fourteen. My mother had, against her will, been sent with her sisters and brother to a boarding school in the American state of Florida. My grandfather, a furniture salesman in Atlanta, Georgia, wanted the children to attend a Christian school, so my grandmother moved down with the children for few years before leaving them to board.

My father had come to the school a year earlier from a rural town in the state of Louisiana. Upon attending the student orientation his second year, he recalls, “I saw these two attractive young ladies—sisters. When I went to class the next day, I discovered that one of them was in my class.”

My parents were in 10th grade that year, the equivalent of SS1. My mother remembers walking into her first class a few minutes early and seeing everyone gathered around a long-legged boy “tilted back in his chair, like you’re not supposed to do,” laughing and telling stories. “I liked him from the very beginning,” she says. When class started, the teacher had students sit in alphabetical order. As Irish luck would have it my father’s surname was McCain and my mother’s surname was McCoy. “Here we are about forty-six years later,” my father says.

The attraction was there from the start, but, as my parents tell it, they were initially just good friends. My dad loved playing basketball and telling funny stories. He made the worst grades of his life that year. My mother, on the other hand, was the top student in their class.

The boarding school did not allow boys and girls to spend much time together outside of class, though they were allowed one date a semester to a school-organized banquet. “I liked your dad,” my mother tells me, “I liked him a lot. But he never seemed to be very interested. Another guy asked me to the banquet, and I didn’t know what to say. How do you say no?” However, when she told her friends that she didn’t really want to go with the boy, he caught wind of it. “It’s ok,” he told her, “you’re free to go with anybody.” A few weeks before the event, on a school field trip, my dad casually asked, “You’ll go to the banquet with me, won’t you?”

“I was a little riled,” she recounts, laughing, “He was so self-confident. But I said yes. That was our first date.”

A few months later, one of my mother’s friends took him aside and said “Look, Danny, Mary really likes you, but if you keep messing around, she’s going to find somebody else.”

“I went back to my room, and sat on my bed,” my dad narrates. “I thought, ‘Mary is everything I could ever ask for.’ I remember sitting on that bed and saying ‘You know, if you are going to try to attract Mary, she’s not going to be attracted to somebody with the kind of grades that you have. I made up my mind, that if I was going to be interested in her, I had to tighten up my academic performance. So I did.” That is when he stopped focusing so much on basketball and started focusing more on school. My mother was still the top student, but my dad was not too far behind. The next year he became class president, and she became class secretary. “Our relationship grew from that point on,” he says. “She was the only person I was interested in.”

During one of the school breaks, my father travelled around the U.S. singing with a men’s quartet, while my mother travelled through Central America with school group. During that summer, my father visited her family in Atlanta, and her brother, Johnny, who was about twelve, kept pestering him, “Why don’t you write her? Why don’t you write her a love letter? Finally, just to get rid of him,” my father narrates, “I sat down and wrote her a little letter, ‘Dear Mary, Hi. How are you doing? Bye, Danny.’ It was a joke.”

Meanwhile, in Guatemala, the girls in my mother’s dorm kept teasing her about all the letters she was writing. One day, she narrates, “they come bringing me a little letter addressed in my brother’s handwriting, but it was from Danny. It said, ‘Hi Mary, Bye. Danny.’ I said, ‘Is this his way of saying, I’m not interested?’” But soon, the girls, who, as a prank, had withheld the fatter letter, handed over my father’s nine page epistle full of news about his singing tours. In the letter he wrote, “Your brother kept tormenting me about writing you, so I wrote him a little letter.”

“Then I knew what had happened,” my mother says.

“Johnny nearly wrecked things,” my dad chuckles. “Fortunately the other letter made it.”

My parents stayed on at the college, where there secondary school was, for their BA degrees. They were married a semester before finishing their coursework. My mother was twenty, my father was twenty-one. At their wedding, they sang a duet.

Following their graduation, my father went on for his Masters degree. Afterwards, their old school invited them back. “I think they really needed Mary,” my dad said, “but they knew they needed to find some sort of job for me.” My mother worked as registrar, while my father supervised the male dormitory, taught classes, and did construction work, putting roofs on houses.

During vacation, on a three-week cross-continental road trip to Alaska, my mother discovered she was pregnant with their first child, my brother Nathaniel. Back in Florida, he was in such a hurry to be born that he arrived a month early in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I’ve always imagined those first few months after Nathaniel was born as having a golden tint, like an old movie. My mother’s office was only a few metres away from their flat so she was able to come home throughout the day to nurse him. Because my dad prepared for classes from home, he watched the baby while she was at work.

Tragedy struck when Nathaniel was four months old. He contracted spinal meningitis and died a few days later.

My parents found comfort in the words of hymns they sang in an empty church near the hospital, in family who drove cross-country to embrace them and weep. Two weeks later, they drove to Alaska again with two other friends, this time in a record six days. They slept in sleeping bags in grass on the side of the road and spent their fourth anniversary in an old cowboy hotel in Calgary, with a bathroom down the hall. Perhaps the fast-paced trip helped numb some of their grief. All the same, “I had a hard time focusing” that year, my mother admitted.

A year later, they moved and my father began working on his PhD. I was born, then my brother, then my sister. In those days before computers, my father wrote his thesis by hand, and my mother typed it up on an electric typewriter. While dissertating, my father also pastored a small independent Methodist church in rural Georgia. That is where my first memories were formed, in the early 80s, living as a pastor’s daughter in a little farming community.

(to be continued)