Better than planned

In the summer of 1970, I drove east from Oregon to Pennsylvania. Packed in my baggage was my absolute certainty that the next summer I would drive back to settle down in the West for the rest of my life.

I had been a Westerner for only five years—three of them as a theological student in San Anselmo, California, and two as a youth pastor in Medford, Oregon. Compared to my native Iowa— home for my first 22 years—America’s West Coast was exotic to the point of feeling forbidden, a lingering remnant of Eden. My change in geography had begun the creation of a new me.

I’d be in and out of Pittsburgh in twelve months, yet another degree packed in bags stuffed into my little brown Cougar.

In twelve months, I was driving out West again…this time to pick up the things I’d left there and bring them back East, to Pittsburgh, my new home.

Things had not worked out as planned. Partially because of my own shortcomings, getting that degree clearly would require more than a year. I had successfully completed the class work, but the dean discouraged the thesis project I proposed and I fiddled away hours buried in Hebrew Psalms. I took on a new church job in the spring, considerably sapping my waning energy for academics. My new call was fun and challenging—the scholarly work, drudgery.

I had even begun to appreciate Pittsburgh,. I had made friends, and I was discovering and enjoying southwestern Pennsylvania’s natural beauty. The changes in me kick-started by living in the West were being refined and secured in the realities of America’s rust belt.

Then, in the spring of 1973 I met my wife-to-be. In a bar.

Our meeting had been planned. Another woman I’d seen a couple of times decided I would be better suited to her college friend, Maxine. She and I had arranged to meet for a drink at a spot near Duquesne University, where Maxine was taking a graduate class. When I arrived, Maxine was in the booth with my date, whose plan turned out to work perfectly.

Maxine is a native Pittsburgher. Our courtship introduced me to more of Pittsburgh than I had yet discovered. As I fell in love with her, I fell in love with her city, experiencing it through her love for it. We married in April, 1974.

Life and call soon took us further east to the D.C. area, then back west to Illinois, and finally, in 1989, east again to suburban Cleveland. Those who know professional football will appreciate how difficult it was for Maxine to agree to call Cleveland home. But she did, and we are home here forever.

Along our way we bore and raised two precious daughters for whom northeast Ohio is home, as in, “home is where you grew up.” They have not lived here for years, and likely never will again.

We considered relocating in the West for the first year or two of our marriage. But its lure was moderated by our growing sense of satisfaction with where we were. The birth of children and a deep desire for them to be able to know their grandparents and extended families soon quelled thoughts of moving any further than we already were from our roots.

Though the years, Maxine and I have often traveled out West. We have revisited my old haunts in the Bay Area and southwest Oregon, and expanded our shared geography to include other parts of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. In the 1980s we discovered the desert southwest, particularly northern New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. We will never get enough of that landscape and culture. We once talked—for about five minutes—of moving to Santa Fe.

The West remains exotic and almost forbidden. I have convinced myself that if I had moved back, I would surely have lost my fantasy of its being Eden reconstituted. Home is real, hopefully beautiful, but often disappointing, wherever it is.

Every time I revisit my personal Eden—including our Eden-in-the-desert—I remember the time I thought I could live there.