I met my wife at Luther College, when we were both freshman. We really didn't like each other. She was actively attempting to overcome her dislike by being nice to me, and I interpreted those efforts as pursuing me. I wound up in a relationship with someone else that year in part to put distance between us. But we'll come back to that.
The first love of my life was a second grader--one of my peers, as I was also a second grader. She was frail, an asthmatic petite blond named Christie Newcomb. She was a major distraction to my school efforts. It took me until fourth grade to be able to spend any time with her, and then we hung out together quite a bit. She, however, became enamored with the Beatles (I liked them, but couldn't even tell them apart in photos), and I, envious of her affections, claimed that the Rolling Stones were better (something I never really believed, but I had just seen them on the Ed Sullivan Show and perceived them as the up-and-coming next thing). That didn't quite end our relationship--for an extended time in fifth grade boys would put me up to trying to catch her and kiss her at the back door after school, and she playfully evaded, but we never got back together. By sixth grade I do not know where she was, but I have always missed her and wondered what became of her.
This was in part because after sixth grade we moved. I was very pleased that we moved. I had a very few "friends", including Ricky Laitila (never was sure how to spell his name, but we were playmates before kindergarten) and Phil Parrizeau (yea, apparently my friends had tough names) and "Bittle" Curry, but none of them were willing to appear to be my friends if anyone else was around. I figured a move would give me a fresh start with new friends--but it didn't work that way. I had no more friends after the move than I did before. I was athletically inept, and that seemed to be the only thing that mattered to my peers. I knew I was musically talented, but had failed to impress people with that yet. My mother always told me I was very intelligent, but she also told me I was handsome, so I knew she was lying.
I did meet John J. "Jay" Fedigan, from whom I learned much about "writing songs", as opposed to "composing music". That had a tremendous impact on my life, but after two years we drifted apart completely and rarely had any interaction with each other.
I had a crush on one of my sister's friends, almost four years my junior but only three years behind me in school, when I was in eighth grade. I never told her--never had the courage, and wasn't at all sure how a girl that young would react to an older boy taking a romantic interest in her. I wondered what became of Jennifer Lee Nash, too, in later years.
I had a couple of brief girlfriend relationships in middle school that are dim memories. One was with Lisa Ahlers, who lived across the street from me and came over every day one summer talking about all the couples she knew. I figured she was hinting, and asked if she wanted to be my girlfriend, and she said she guessed so. We spent the summer together, and she promptly denied it when school resumed in the fall. Then there was a girl who was almost a groupie--Artie Robbins and I were playing together mostly at parties that summer after eighth grade, doing songs we'd written, and Dory became the girl who sat on my lap and snuggled up with me. She was sweet, and I have no idea why we drifted apart, but she was a year younger, which put us in different schools in the fall when I became a freshman.
Artie became a good friend and musical companion until my senior year of high school, when I wrapped up the precision rock band BLT Down and transitioned it to become The Last Psalm, and he, being Jewish, couldn't really play in a Christian band. We still kept touch for a couple years; he became a chef, last I heard.
I had a girlfriend at summer camp, Sue Wallace, whom I saw several summers in a row and liked very much. At some point I started writing to her about a longer term relationship, and she started being very "rational" about it, asking my opinion on things like zero population growth and birth control--pretty wild, considering she was two years my junior and I was not yet out of high school. That sort of fizzled after that.
The first not summer girlfriend I had wasn't until my junior year of high school, when a freshman took a particular interest in me and her friends brokered the introductions. I went out with her because it was socially better to have a girlfriend than not, but we never got to know each other, to the point that I don't remember her name at all--although it might have been Sue, but then, that makes a lot of Susans in my history.
When I was a high school senior, Deanna was the freshman who was interested in me, and I hung out with her for a while. By then, though, I was very committed to a solidly Christian life, and kept inviting her to come to the local Christian coffeehouse (a very youth-oriented experience). She made excuses for a long time, until finally she outright told me no, she was not interested. I walked away, saying that without that connection we had nothing in common.
Interestingly, she showed up the next weekend, and was there for many weekends after that; but we never got back together--she started dating someone else she met there. I played the field for the rest of my high school career, but was, for the first time in my life, actually popular with the girls--at least, with the freshman girls.
Jeff Zurheide is another important friend. I met him at camp, but he lived half an hour away and when he started driving in our senior year he joined The Last Psalm as lead guitar and vocalist. He also went to Luther (and to Gordon, but completely independent decisions from mine), and played with me in several bands over that time; but he became more and more opposed to me running or fronting for any band, for reasons that are much to complicated to explain here.
Then we get to college. I mentioned that I met my wife there, but also that in trying to distance myself from her I wound up dating someone else. That would be Sue Adams. Fact is, I need not have done this, because none of the girls thought much of me there--they thought I was conceited, and particularly that I thought I knew more about music and performance than anyone else there. Then my band, The Last Psalm which had been playing in various spots around Bergen County, was invited to open at a "Coffeehouse Night", a sort of conference for youth-oriented outreach ministries of that sort throughout the area. Sue was among those who had thought I thought I knew so much about music, who then thought maybe I wasn't conceited to think that after all. We impressed, and it made a big difference to my social standing--and got me a girlfriend.
I almost married Sue; we were "pre-engaged" at one point, and I spent part of the summer at her house. Then that fall a series of events hit us hard, and over the coming months I discovered that she had been lying to me about something (she had lied early in the relationship and couldn't figure out how to undo it). In an odd twist, it came down to the fact that she lied to me about the contents of a drink she served me and attempted to persuade me by asking, "Would I lie to you?" The answer turned out to be yes, and we never repaired the relationship.
During that time, Janet more than once said to herself that if she had a boyfriend as nice as me, she would treat him better than Sue did. She got her chance. Janet was known to be the girl who hung out of her window talking to boys after curfew (the girls had a curfew, the boys did not), and I was at first still working that security job I mentioned in the other thread and getting back after curfew, so I spent many hours just talking with her. Those talks expanded to long walks involving talking--once walking so far we discovered that Hackensack across the river had a submarine one could tour, and took the tour before returning home. She was officially pursuing my drummer, John, and I teased her that our relationship would not be serious because she was in love with John Mastick and I had to play the field, but by the time graduation had passed and we were together that summer, we became engaged.
There have been a number of people I "might have married" since then, but in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, "He will be faithful to his sooth, 'til they are wed, and even after." There were a couple of sweet girls at Gordon College whom I got to know as friends, some very attractive, but I was committed. It also helped that I was not particularly good at reading the feelings of girls. I recall that there was one girl who took over as secretary at the radio station who was sweet and pretty and always very kind to me, but she was married and I was married and although I liked her I never thought anything more about it than that. I found out some years later that her cousin-in-law was horrified to learn that she had a terrible crush on me, but I never suspected that.
I can count the really close friends I have had over the years on my fingers, and most of those relationships have been fraught with disaster and angst, but those are details I'd rather not discuss. The one exception is probably David Oldham, who was my brother's peer and close friend but connected with me and worked as a tech and ultimately vocalist in The Last Psalm and then returned a decade later to play bass in TerraNova, and ultimately became a pastor of a church. He married one of my earliest Last Psalm vocalists. I've lost touch with him only in the past couple years, following a computer crash that took out all my e-mail addresses, but he is the one person I trust most.
--M. J. Young
