I met my wife-to-be in the Fall of 1973 at a high school football game. I say “met,” but that term would be at once an exaggeration and an understatement. What I met that evening were her bright blue eyes, her happy, playful smile, and what, fifty years later, her grandchildren now call her trademark Nani Laugh.
The first time ever I saw your face
Ewan MacColl
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
What I also met that night was a level of attention uncharacteristically paid to me by a young girl already in touch with an unseen realm that seemed to hover above an unfolding roadmap of a very long future together.
I was sitting with a couple of friends on a bleacher down low—perhaps as close to the field as the first row. Kari and her friends were sitting five or six rows above us with no spectators in between. As the game got started, the void between us began to fill with giggles, cackles, and the occasional belly laugh whose combined spectacle became for me a far more interesting draw than the grid-iron show I had come to watch. Nor can I now recall a single detail connected to the game beyond the mild indignation I initially felt at being pulled away from it by so much obviously unrelated commotion.
“Don’t those girls have any sense of what is going on out on the field?” I might have said to myself as the story unfolded behind me. “Why had they bothered to come if not to enjoy the show?”
As their fun seemed to increase, it crossed my mind that they had come to take part in a show quite different than the one I had been watching. Theirs featured a good time with good friends and, as Carly Simon once put it, to have a few eyes on them. As my appreciation for their infectious laughter increased, I, too, stopped paying attention to the game in front of me and to attune my ear to the conversation five or six rows behind me. But unable to decipher what, or who was so funny, and almost begrudgingly at first, I looked over my shoulder to see what all the joy was about.
“There goes my agency.”
As I look back over 50 years to the scene unfolding in the bleachers that night, my first impression was simple enough. It was just a group of girls talking, laughing, and enjoying whatever fun struck them at that moment. Someone was having a grand time back there and good on ’em. And I was curious. No sooner did I look over my shoulder did it come clear they had spotted us first. Were they watching us instead of the game? Had they been laughing at us?
Following my lead or equally bored with the game, my buddies eventually turned around as well. The girls must have found our choreographed rubbernecking funny, as they broke out laughing at that as well. The cycle repeated a few times. The girls laughed. The boys turned around. What was so funny? And all the football fans, no longer watching the game but watching the boys watching the girls?
I can’t recall which of the many times when glancing backward—now to discover the source of all the fun; now to hope I might somehow join them in it; now to look closer in order to discern whether I had seen the girls before—I began to regard the trio, not as the party I first turned to check out, but as three distinct individuals; three separate laughs; three unique smiles; and—was it possible?—three audacious girls flirting with three unsuspecting boys.
My first impression was that the two girls on each side of the middle girl were older than I, perhaps a year ahead of me in school, as I had some vague sense that they were more comfortable in their high school skin than I was by that time and that I had even seen them around. I’m pretty sure one of them was a friend of my older sister. I had a more challenging time placing in time the girl in the middle. She was definitely younger than her two friends. Was she my age? A year younger? Something about her mix of sophistication and innocence told me she was somehow a little of both. While I might have seen her two friends the school year earlier, the girl in the middle was, though I had never seen her before, instantly recognizable in a manner I did not recognize. And at that moment, my looking at her, her now looking at me, me still befuddled by their inside joke that eluded me, its one-way broadcast appearing straight at me—in the middle of all of that—a silent, sober voice from everywhere and nowhere spoke four words to my soul that were at once completely foreign, not at first instantly welcome, and to this day unmistakably, and irretrievably true.
“There goes my agency.”
In my belief system, the term agency refers to the God-given power of free will and choice. Agency, sometimes called in my faith, free agency, refers to an irrevocable right to choose one’s own path within a system that allows nothing, or no one else, to interfere with the right to choose for oneself. To accept and exercise such a gift is first to learn, and eventually to understand without thought or question, that in choosing one path among several, the rest will collapse like a wave.
“There goes my agency.”
What did that even mean?
As to the part of the voice that felt separate from my own, what my mind expressed as “There goes my agency,” at that very moment, another mind joined mine, its version, “There goes your agency!” The cosmic pronouncement that we, the outside and inside messengers, joined together to produce an idea that might have been solely mine carried with it not just the specter of irrevocable consequence but a host of there-must-be-a-way-out caveats, what-ifs, and watered down revisionist futures. Was I being told that the nameless girl in the middle was, or would become in my life, more than just a happy-go-lucky spectator at a by-now irrelevant sporting event? Would we become friends? Was the agency involved more than just a “you don’t know me, but you will” signal for me to tie back to this moment from some future perc?
But who was I kidding? I had, even by that phase of my young life, learned to associate the single-dual voice not with the whimsical, the indefinite, or the merely notional. That still small voice had by then become for me no less than a call from the profound, the sublime, the invisible reaches that connected my walk through this middle distance with the heavens on either end of it. I knew the instant I heard those particular voices, conjoined in that familiar manner, that I was not to trifle with their message by fobbing it off as some abstract imponderable. “There goes my agency” came as nothing less to my mind and heart than the foregone conclusion that the girl whose blue eyes had just then if only for the briefest of moments, was the woman I was going to marry.
“Let’s be a family.”
Four years later, after formally meeting Karin Ann “Kari” Wyman but not before falling in love, temporarily out of love, and then falling back in love while shivering in deep conversation on that same stadium bleacher a couple of Februarys later, we did indeed marry. My recollections of how that came about are as follows.
After high school and our first year of attending college together, I spent Kari’s sophomore and junior years doing volunteer church work in Europe. After the first year and a half of our separation, during which we kept up a long-distance if only platonic, relationship via old-fashioned letter-writing that brought at least our minds closer together, I halted our paper conversation to focus more fully on my mission. But within hours of my return, Kari and I were already talking, if only in vague but hopeful terms, about marriage. One evening, ten days after seeing her for the first time in two years, Kari and I found ourselves standing on the driveway leading up to her home. The unrehearsed words at a certain moment came not entirely unbidden to my mind—I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but until the still small voice of my youth re-entered my imagination, my tongue knew of no words to express it.
“Let’s be a family,” the voices in my head and heart said simultaneously.
“Yes,” came Kari’s reply, “let’s be a family.”
What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.
Stephen Stills
Like the words heard and re-spoken to my mind when I “met” Kari for the first time, the conjoining of this new combination of four words unlocked not more language but a vision from somewhere within that single-dual mind of mine. Five individuals arranged in two rows like a family portrait smiled at us with their eyes, their lips, and the brightness of their images from a distant realm. Moments later, Kari played back for me her version of the same family portrait she had also witnessed at the same instant.
In the peculiar way the inexplicable manifests its truth through the smallest of details, Kari and I would sometimes scour that shared minds’ eye view as if it were an unvoiced prophecy of its own. Which child might come next? Were there indeed six? What part had they played in bringing Kari and me together? What combination of their agency, our agency, and Heaven’s will was at work above a football bleacher on at least two occasions all those years ago?
