Somedoby to Love, Part 2

Read Part 1 Here

The one beauty of a long distance relationship is that it stands or falls on communication. If it survives, then you are able to communicate very well. If it doesn’t, well, you apparently can’t. Still, day after day it begins to wear on you, having someone so dear so very far away. Sometimes, I doubted the validity of it all. Other times, it has been more real to me than my next breath. I began to make good on my intention to love her. I did the sweet boyfriend things: texted her every night after she goes to bed, so she had a message waiting for her when she woke up; went to visit her at least once a month; and, naturally, gave her flowers every time I visited, often accompanied by dark chocolate (her favorite).

I began to notice, the more affectionate I grew toward Elizabeth, the more affection I had, the more affection I wanted to give, and the more affection I wanted to see all people give each other. I also began to see manners of displaying that affection more and more. Even in Rubik’s cubes. So I sent her a picture one morning, claiming the artistic validity of a heart comprised of a Rubik’s cube:

“We're walkin' into the fields.
We're walkin into the forest.
The moon is before us.
Up above
We're holdin' hands in the rain
S-sayin' words like I love you
D-d-d'you love me? Yeah

My my heart like a kick drum
My my heart like a kick drum
My my heart like a kick drum
My my love like a voice.”
—The Avett Brothers “Kick Drum Heart”

I made her a mixtape of songs that reminded me of what we had. And another. The second mix I titled “i carry your heart with me” after an E.E. Cummings poem I quite like. It goes like this:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

This made the difficulty less difficult, knowing that I carried her heart, and she carried mine. The problem was that because we had each other’s heart, our hearts were still not together. But I was okay with “fearing no fate” because “she was my fate.” Some days I literally looked up at the sky and thought that “whatever a sun will always sing” was her.


The real predicament came when I realized that the choice I had made, to love Elizabeth, no matter what, had actually happened. You must understand, in my experience of being me, normally the things I choose to do of my own will fail relatively terribly, as my will is very weak. So when this one thing I had willed actually came to be, the logical solution is that something supplemented my own will. Does this mean that the choice was not mine? No. But was I alone in making it? I think not. And, to be honest, I am glad it was not—I would have probably chosen something a lot dumber.

Still, I now had the dilemma of my love. I loved Elizabeth. Normally this is a prerequisite for marriage. But I wasn’t ready for marriage, was I? I had always heard about guys being scared of commitment, and scoffed at the possibility that I would fall into such a pathetic condition. No, I would be a real man, buck up, and propose when I came to such a juncture. But when I realized that I might actually be in love, it genuinely scared me. When you are in love, true love, real love, there is nothing that anyone can tell you beforehand, there is no experience you have had off of which can base your thoughts. You have no idea what to do.

“People, people, people, they make it sound so easy
They say just do what your heart tells you to
But sometimes you cannot feel it
Sometimes you cannot hear it
Sometimes it won’t talk back to you
And yeah I know you love me
And yeah I want to love you back
And how I know you love me
And how I want to love you bad.”
—The Avett Brothers “Pretty Girl From San Diego”

I was nowhere near ready to make that commitment, and yet, everything in my life was ready for it. My pastor friend encouraged me to press on, telling me that commitment is like a swimming pool, you can’t expect to get a feeling for it by dipping your toes in on the side. The only way you are going to get used to the temperature is by jumping in headlong. So I decided to jump.

On the seventh of July, as we were driving from her parents’ house in Florida, to my family in South Carolina, while I was sharing parts of who I am that no one had been privy to before, I told her I loved her. This is, I have heard, a huge milestone. For Elizabeth and myself, it was inevitable. There was no other way it could have happened. The way we treated each other—loved each other—provided for no other circumstance than this. One day in February I asked a girl to go to Chick-fil-a with me, and five months later I am in love.

“I say hey I'll be gone today
But I'll be back all around the way
It seems like everywhere I go
The more I see
The less I know
But I know one thing:
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

I've been a lot of places all around the way
I've seen a lot joy and I've seen a lot of pain
But I don't want to write a love song for the world,
I just want to write a song about a boy and a girl”
—Michael Franti “Say Hey (I Love You)”

Love has occasionally been viewed as requirement for marriage. I subscribe to such a tradition, and was immediately aware of the impending doom of my marriage. I say doom because I could see no positive ending to the matter. Having lived with myself for twenty one and one-half years at this point, I had begun to notice my tendency to be a jackass, and the consistent degradation of many relationships such a tendency causes. Naturally, a relationship as weighty as this would necessarily result in an even more weighty screw up on my part. Past experiences began to rise in my memory: every girl, every failure. It hurts some, because I wanted to share everything with her, but I didn’t want to hurt her with my semi-secret mistakes.

At this point in our story, I fell into a twofold trap: first, I assumed that I would have been able to fully and successfully love Elizabeth for the rest of my life all on my own strength; second, I completely removed her feelings from my calculations. I seemed to have forgotten that, if I was incapable of loving her, if I did not love her, then she would have probably let me know. Love, while it is not a feeling, can always be felt. We felt it.

“I got secrets from you, you got secrets from me
Because you're so worried about what I'm gonna think,
Baby I'm worried too.
But if love is a game, girl, then you're gonna win.
I'll spend the rest of my life bringing victory in,
If you want me to, yeah!”
—The Avett Brothers “Paranoia in B-flat Major”

The real test of love is in real life. Not in the happy, romantic, lovey-dovey moments. Even Hollywood can nail that. Love comes in when life comes in: honest, average life. I realized at some point in our relationship that Elizabeth asks “Why?” when deciding to do something, and I tend to ask “Why not?” This gives rise to serious conflicts when I decide to do something obnoxious just for obnoxiousness’ sake, and she wants to behave like a reasonable adult.

Elizabeth eats slowly, with purpose, while I tend to inhale my meals with the speed of the latest Hoover vacuum. She likes to plan things and be organized; I prefer spontaneity—that is unless something undermines the plan I had in mind—in which case I freak out. I take what are often joking discussions and slam them into heated arguments.

Each of these concerns has the potential to be a serious problem. Or not. The choice is ours. I could resolve every issue we ever have, I could work very hard to make sure that she never has a problem with anything I do, and she could do the same. I could buy her flowers, write her poems, massage her feet each and every day, but that wouldn’t be our love.

Love is a funny thing in that you can’t earn it. I don’t love her because she’s done the right things to make me do so; as if love were a cause-effect equation where she could force my hand into falling in love with her. No, I love her because she is mine. Because there is an ideal world, and that world includes me in love with her, us loving each other. I love her because that is the task that God has given me: not that it is a chore, a Sisyphian struggle that I must simply undergo; rather it is a blessing and a calling that fulfills me when I do it, rather than draining my effort and resources.

“Don't care where we're goin’, just wanna be with you.
Put your head on my shoulder, tell me what you been through.
When I lose my focus, you remind me of the truth.
Lift us up to the heavens for a bird's eye view.

One woman for me:
Other half of my soul, you are my queen.
One woman for me:
Other half of my soul, roots of my tree .”
—Matisyahu “Unique is My Dove”

You may be wondering what more there is to say? Just a few closing statements: our story is not extraordinary, although for us, it is both ordinary and life changing at the same time. I doubt you have been able to glean life lessons from my words—you, reader, are probably wiser than myself. I hope you are left with the impression that this story is little more than mundane, because that is where I live, and that is where you live, and if you have found love, or if you are going to find love, I all but guarantee that is where it will be—in everyday life.

On the ninth of October, in the year of our Lord 2010, I took Elizabeth to the Smithsonian Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. A small white box in my pocket went off in the metal detector. Afterward, we had a picnic lunch at a beautiful park adjacent to the Washington Monument. After a considerable amount of wasting time and rambling conversation, I had Elizabeth stand up next to me, told her much of what you have just read, and asked her if she would marry me. When I pulled the little white box out of my pocket, I opened it upside down. She still said yes. There is not much more that I can tell you. You have arrived at the end of the story. But we haven’t.

“She keeps it simple
And I am thankful for her kind of lovin'
'Cause it's simple

No longer do we wonder if we're together
We're way past that
And I've already asked her
So in January we're gettin' married.”
—The Avett Brothers “January Wedding”

Somebody to Love, Part 1

“I am the least difficult of men: all I want is boundless love”
—Frank O’Hara

When I was six years old, I proposed to my friend Sarah. She and I went to church together and were definitely friends and definitely destined to be together. Sadly, she disagreed. Sarah declined my proposal on the grounds that I could not do a cartwheel. As a six year old, I had no idea that these things were so important in marriage. Here I had learned it was about unconditional love, but the real secret to a successful marriage was acrobatics. This brought about a radical change in my worldview. It also established a precedent, as every romantic relationship or pseudo-relationship I had from the age of six until my junior year of college failed because of my own inadequacy. Not that I always said something stupid or wasn’t caring, but I always looked at my relationships as a means of satisfaction.

In high school, I really liked Katie, but I didn’t do a great job of keeping up with caring for her—for the first week of our relationship, I did little more than smile as I passed her locker at school. That’s a big win for the male gender. She was my first kiss—I don’t regret it, but it didn’t help me care for her selflessly. I do regret the next few girls I kissed. Katie, I kissed because I truly cared for her. Marie and Erin I kissed for the sake of kissing. Then came the careful flirtations and never-official-relationship crushes, each of which was a new opportunity for me to selfishly entangle lovely young women who were undeserving of such foolishness: Allison, Haley, Anna, Kathryn. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.

Then came Bethany. Bethany was not so much a failure, because by my junior year at Winthrop University, I had learned it was a good thing to actually take the time to state my intentions and ask her on a date. It was to Waffle House, a prime location. We stayed until 1:30am on a Sunday morning, after she had been babysitting and I had been square dancing and we both had church early the next morning. These days were fun—I liked her and she knew it. We spent time together and all intentions were open, honest, and discussable at any time. It was less than pleasant when she said we should just be friends—although I can think of precious few times it is unpleasant to have a friend—but she was right. She was a remarkable young woman, I was a less than stellar young man, and we would not have worked out. But, like that first kiss with Katie, I don’t regret it. It set the stage for a grand finale that has only just begun to start. Still, I was upset—I had done everything like I was supposed to, and it still didn’t work out!

“Each morning I get up I die a little
Can barely stand on my feet
Take a look in the mirror and cry
Lord what you're doing to me
I have spent all my years in believing you
But I just can't get no relief, Lord!
Somebody, somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to love? “
—Queen “Somebody to Love”

I first met Elizabeth when we were both going to a summer conference in Panama City, FL. I distinctly remember thinking to myself “She is really cute. Too bad she goes to Vanderbilt, that would never work out.” When asked about this same conference, she told me “I thought you were a little weird and maybe a little rude. I thought you didn’t like me at all, even as a person. I remember having a conversation with Joel [a mutual friend], asking ‘T.J. hates me, right?’” Wrong. The two years too young T.J. in all his wisdom was very lacking in his ability to wisely interact with women.

The first time that I really met Elizabeth was on Saturday, the sixth of February, 2010. A series of fortunately unfortunate events including a formidable snowstorm in Washington, D.C. where she was an elementary school teacher and the fear of being trapped in the apartment with her much loathed roommates sent her packing to Rock Hill, SC. Through a series of fortuitous events I can only attribute to God, but you may feel free to call luck, chance, or fate, the person whom Elizabeth went to visit, her former (my current) youth pastor Mike, now resides in Rock Hill, where I ever so auspiciously attend Winthrop University.

When I “met her” this time I had the same thoughts as before—“she is really cute, and really nice, but she lives seven hours away, how would that ever work?” This time, however, we had a conversation. We had multiple conversations. She laughed at my jokes. There are few things more masculating for a man than a woman laughing at your jokes. Knowing that woman thinks you are funny and entertaining while still taking you seriously makes you feel like you are more than insignificant. We connected on serious matters like faith, a distaste for the mixed martial arts match everyone was watching on Pay-Per-View, the television shows Pscyh and Leverage, and the band the Avett Brothers. After our conversations at the MMA match and the Superbowl (which just so happened to be the next day), I thought of something.

On Monday, February eighth, after several back-and-forth-decisions in my head, I came by her number from our mutual friend Joel, and called her:
“Hey, uh, Elizabeth, this is T.J. I got your number from Joel, I hope you don’t mind.”
No, that was fine (or something along those lines)
“I was wondering if you would like to get some lunch with me. I have a little bit of free time, and I would like to go out to lunch with you if you would like to.”

I didn’t give her much time to react: I was very direct. (She tells me that I was not usually so serious). She said yes, and proceeded to walk out into the living room to tell Mike, “I think I am going on a date with T.J.”

She thought correct—I took her to the pinnacle of all first date locations: Chick-fil-a. You must understand, in my mind, Chick-fil-a is a magical combination of Jesus and chicken. My roommate told me this first date venue was the clincher for our relationship. The beauty of our first date was not primarily the location, rather, it was the lack of awkward first date conversation. She expected it to be miserable, having experienced many horrible first dates. When it didn’t suck, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself.

I felt like we could really communicate, free from the ambiguities of feelings and intentions, as it was, after all, just a date. The first date was incredibly significant for me, because I realized something that day in Chick-fil-a: I am a really fast eater, and Elizabeth is not. That is it. The sun didn’t shine brighter. The air didn’t smell likes roses. There were no unicorns or rainbows or angelic choruses to signify this fateful beginning of a new relationship. There were just a guy and a girl, talking. It was glorious.

That first week was, I believe, quite literally a gift from God. It snowed so heavily in the D.C. area that Elizabeth was forced to stay in Rock Hill until Sunday. This provided us with plentiful opportunities to spend time together—something of a commodity in a long distance relationship. We had dinner and lunch several times, went to see the movie Valentine’s Day—both agreeing that it left something to be desired—and we even went to Mike’s wife’s play.

That Sunday was Valentine’s Day, a fact which first—frightening, as the relationship had yet to be established and I didn’t know what that meant regarding the sharing of gifts, flowers, etc.; and second—encouraging. I felt that were few more preferable ends to a week that was shaping up to be a very promising relationship. Therefore, I did what any man would do—going with what I knew, I gave her flowers. Actually, just one flower. I only gave one, because I wanted her to be sure that I liked her, but not think I was ready to propose.
The truth is—I was ready to propose.

The very next week, while talking to a pastor friend, I asked if it was too early to buy a ring. Laughing at my “joke,” he paused, shrewdly realizing I was only half joking. In all seriousness, it was quite a ridiculous conclusion on my part: one week, with a girl who lives seven hours away, and I am already seriously considering marriage? I don’t quite know what was going through my head. All I knew was that I had never thought about a woman like I thought about Elizabeth. Not felt, but thought.

I had felt the emotional roller coaster of attraction and infatuation before, but I had always thought it was an opportunity to get the fulfillment that every relationship always promises but never delivers. I did not think this way with Elizabeth. It would have been difficult to expect fulfillment from someone who lives over 400 miles away, with whom I only talked for an hour each evening. With Elizabeth, I thought that I liked her very much, and I wanted to love her very much as well. So I did. I already knew from the recent influx of only slightly more realistic romantic films (the best source, of course, for practical knowledge) that love is not an emotion, but a choice. So I chose. I chose her. I chose to love her.

“Violent is the motion in my heart and in my body and mind
And silent is the feeling that I lost but I'm determined to find
And love is but an ocean, unrealistic notion
But I cling to her devotion and I let it pull me down to the floor
It goes on, on, on, on
It goes on, on, on, on
It goes on, on, on, on
It goes on, on, on.”
—The Avett Brothers “It Goes On and On”

These first weeks, these early forays in to what it meant to be in a long distance relationship were bitter only in the distance that separated us, but sweet in everything else. They were at best, unconventional. Not that love is ever conventional. Conventional love is made in Hollywood, and as the Avett Brothers so wisely point out, “life is more than just two hours long.” For both of us, this was the first relationship in a long time, and the first long distance relationship at all. We had no idea what we were doing. Add to that the fact that I was actually acting like a sensible, serious adult in my pursuit of this lovely young woman (somewhat of a rarity up to this point in my life), and you have a most interesting mix.

For the first month, we didn’t call it dating, didn’t indicate we were “in a relationship” on Facebook. And yet, we were. We talked every night. She had to be in bed by ten and I had to call after nine because of the cell phone minutes, so nine to ten every single night I was in my room, on the phone. It became “our time,” as we regularly built each other into our lives. We repeatedly admitted to each other the “newness” of it all—how we didn’t know what we were doing when it came to a long distance relationship, how we had yet to have a relationship this serious. It was exciting, like Columbus’ trans-Atlantic voyage.

“We don't know what we're doing
We do it again
We're just amateur lovers
With amateur friends!”
—Switchfoot “Amateur Lovers”

Read Part 2 Here

Hallelujah, By and By

The drive from south Miami to Orlando to see Grampa and Granny takes a few hours. In most of the pictures I see of me and my Grampa, I am doing something with him. We are playing with blocks: I love building things, and he is a self-taught artist, so it works out. I remember playing baseball in his backyard, and the times he lets us ride on his lawnmower or in the trailer behind it. I walk into his garage while he and my dad are working on our red Dodge Caravan. I have a vague recollection of either a child-oriented lecture on mechanics, or perhaps just eavesdropping on what they are saying. He comes down and helps my dad fix our house after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

He is an average sized man, especially when standing next to my six-foot-four dad. Although, when I am a young child, he seems to be the biggest man I know. Everyone speaks well of him: as a kid with everything figured out, I know my mom has to say nice things, it is her dad. But even my dad makes it seem like he is the biggest man in the family. “When you marry a woman, you marry a family,” my father tells me on more than one occasion. I can only assume he has his father-in-law in mind when he says that.

It seems that in all my memories he looks exactly the same: He wears glasses (although he didn’t used to); His hair has always been grayish white. He is never bald, but never has a full head of hair. Even in the old pictures of him, his wife, my mom and her sister, his blonde hair, not balding, looked just like the “Grampa” I visit through the years. He laughs a deep, manly chuckle that only comes from a palpable enjoyment of life and seems to assure you whatever was just said is undoubtedly funny.

We call him “Grampa.” Not Papa, Grandad, Grandaddy, or Granpa. No, he is very specific: he wants to be called Grampa, with an “m.” I don’t know why he wants us to call him that, but we don’t mind. He never asks us to do anything unreasonable, and so as a kid it seems natural, right. As if there is some natural way the world should be, and that way includes me calling him Grampa.

Now that I think about it, he hardly asks us to do anything at all. There is the leaf-raking session every time we visited the house they moved to in the Northeast Georgia mountains, but even that was enforced by my parents, not him. The one request he regularly makes of us is not to fight with each other. The only time I ever see him cry or get angry is when I fight with my brother or sisters. He explains a concept I am reluctant to accept: how “He’ll always be your brother,” or “You’ll always have your sisters, and you need to be there for each other.”

Naturally I try to listen to what he says—my Grampa is, after all, the smartest man ever. I mean, he lived through part of the Great Depression, and World War II. I remember the first time I really understood that. I was astounded that I knew someone who was alive during a time in actual history. He shows me one of his elementary class pictures, and the one thing that strikes me is the lack of shoes. There are only a handful of children with shoes, and Grampa isn’t one of them. In the picture, he doesn’t seem to mind.

My Grampa always impresses me when I think of him, though I can’t tell you exactly what it is that impresses me. It isn’t his stint in the Army at a radio relay base in Africa during the Korean War. It isn’t the successful ownership of Professional Carpet Systems for almost a decade, during which he employed my dad between jobs. It isn’t his car phone—very prestigious to have when they pre-empted the cell phone—although as a kid this is one of the coolest things about him. He always quick adapts to new technology—the computer, internet, and e-mail—not a common feat among his peers. It’s not the multiple battles with heart issues, the quadruple bypass surgery. It isn’t even his faith: a go to church every Sunday and let God’s love show between each visit sort of faith; the kind that preachers preach about when they’re really talking about Jesus. It isn’t any of these things. It is probably all of them, and then some.

He tells me once about how one time in church when another guy had the nerve to put his arm around my Granny before she was dating Grampa. He explains how there rose up in him an incredible urge to throttle the guy. He didn’t, naturally. It was in church. My mom tells me about how he got my Granny. She was the Baptist pastor’s daughter, and their first date was to—gasp—a drive-in movie, an act comparably abominable to dancing. Sometimes I see the old 1950s couple transported to their living room: Still with the pet names and a kiss on the cheek and the occasional clasped hand.

I have a faint memory of his pipe but I may just be imagining that. My Grampa would never smoke. Except that he used to smoke cigarettes but switched to a pipe because my aunt was allergic. He quit the pipe and threw it into a sinkhole next to his house the day his father died of lung cancer. “It’s a three minute addiction,” he says once, “If you can withstand it for three minutes, it’ll go away.” I don’t smoke, so I doubt I’ll ever know if that’s really the case or if my Grampa just has extraordinary willpower. But I sure as hell am not going to pick up a habit that my Grampa tried and then quit. He is, after all, just about the smartest man ever.

As religious as Grampa is, going to visit him never feels like going to church. I’m always learning things, but never being preached at. His favorite hymn is “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s an old country church hymn about going “to a home on God's celestial shore...when this life is o’er.” I never know it is his favorite until they play it at his funeral.

My dad chokes up a little when he tells me. I don’t understand why everyone cries: he didn’t flinch in the face of death—he is escaping “like a bird from prison bars” to “a land where joy shall never end.” But they aren’t sad because it isn’t his time, or because of the tragedy of it all. They are crying because when a man as big as my Grampa passes, you mourn.

Deconstructing Childhood Construction

When your dad works for the church, your family doesn’t have much disposable income. As a kid, I rarely picked up on this—I didn’t mind eating the store brand cereals or wearing Wal-Mart clothes. What I was aware of, though, was the fact that my family didn’t get as many new toys as my friends’ families. This wasn’t a problem, but it did result in one necessity: recyclable entertainment. My personal venue for such reusable fun was my substantial collection of Legos.

The infinite combination of seemingly endless plastic blocks occupied a significant portion of my childhood. The spaceship of today was tomorrow’s race car, the next day’s superhero base, and the next week’s medieval fortress. For me, the joy was not in the imaginative battles and adventures the finally constructed sets could engage in, but in the creative process itself. I would rather have the opportunity to build one set than play with three. My brother would hastily construct a not-to-poorly designed car and then immediately begin to ask if I would play some variation of a race or demolition derby. For me, this was unthinkable! How dare he suggest I risk destroying that which I had spent such a lengthy and tedious amount of time constructing!?

The constructs I was most proud of were perfectly coordinated in structure and color; not a single Lego brick was unnecessary or out of place. I would naturally build any brand new set exactly as the instructions indicated. The longer the pieces were in my possession, however, the more likely they were to be shuffled and recycled into a new, inventive piece of sci-fi machinery, the specific engineering of which only I could explain. These prized productions would then proceed to occupy a special location on top of my dresser or bookshelf, safe from the war-mongering grip of my “less scrupulous” fellow creator.

Yet, even my carefully conceived and composed creations were eventually destroyed, if only to make way for the next great endeavor of my early engineering career. Sometimes, I wonder if I missed out a little bit. Not that I would trade the care I put into making each and every set. I have merely found myself pondering my brother’s consistent, endearing urge to just play, and mine to think and create. Maybe my 10-year-old self could construct a happy-medium bridge between the creative process and simply enjoying the participation.