How I Met My Wife, Susan

Every life has a few defining moments, days that quietly change everything.

Mine came disguised as a favor for my father, a drive to Tampa International Airport in January 7, 1977.

I had no idea that ordinary favor was about to become one of those defining moments, the day my whole life quietly began to turn.

I have to back up a few years first.

I came home from Vietnam carrying things no one could see. I had been boots on the ground over there, close enough to war to smell it, and I brought all of it home with me.

The noise that wouldn’t quiet. The faces that wouldn’t leave.

The nights I’d jolt awake still back in the jungle, heart slamming, reaching for a rifle that wasn’t there.

For nearly ten years I tried to put myself back together, and the pieces just wouldn’t hold.

These were the Civil Rights years too, and in too many rooms I was still just “the colored boy,” a man who had bled for his country and still couldn’t find his place in it.

I wondered where someone like me was supposed to fit.

One night I came home drunk, got down on my knees, and prayed from someplace deeper than my head.

“Lord, give me one good woman I can love and be faithful to for the rest of my life.”

No bargaining. Just the honest cry of a man at the end of himself.

I didn’t know it then, but God often begins answering a prayer long before you recognize the answer. Mine was already alive up in Toronto, going about her days.

My father pastored a church and was always helping somebody, and now and then he volunteered me too.

So when an elderly woman named Jane needed her cousin picked up from Tampa, Dad asked if I’d go. I wasn’t thrilled, until he smiled and said:

“You can take my brand-new Lincoln Continental Mark IV.”

That settled it. All I knew was that her name was Susan and she’d be wearing green. I pictured an older lady.

I stood at the gate, watching one face after another, and no elderly woman in green anywhere - I was getting agitated!

Then, behind me, a voice.

“Are you Eddie?”

I turned around, and the whole airport went quiet.

She was young. She was white. She was wearing green. And she was nothing like what I’d pictured. Right there, I was smitten.

“Are you Susan?”

She smiled. And nearly fifty years later, I still light up whenever she gives me that smile.

I loaded her bags into the Lincoln, put the T-top down, slid Barry White into the tape deck, and took the long way home.

I wasn’t in any hurry. I just wanted a few more minutes beside her.

Then I learned she was engaged. But she never flirted or sent a mixed signal. She was simply keeping a promise she’d already made.

You can tell everything about a person by how they act when no one is asking them to be good. Character like that is rare, and it’s exactly what I’d prayed for.

“I’ve got five sisters,” I told her when I dropped her off. “If you ever want to meet them, call me.” She called the next day.

Over the next couple of years she kept coming back, and before long she felt like one of us.

And no matter where I was or what I had going on, the minute I heard Susan was back in town, I made it my business to be free to drive her around.

I called myself her bodyguard. Nobody had asked me to be one, but it was the best excuse I had to stay close to her.

One afternoon she looked over and said, “Eddie, I really like you.” Then she went home to Toronto and ended her engagement.

That couldn’t have been easy. But she knew where her heart was.

The world didn’t make it simple. A Black man and a white woman together still turned heads then, and people saw our colors long before they saw us.

Where the world saw two categories, we only ever saw each other. Real love looks past the labels and sees straight to the soul.

Someone once asked my father what he thought about his son marrying a white woman. He just smiled and said, “I don’t care what color she is, as long as she gets my son to do right.”

On January 3, 1979, we married in a historic courthouse in Toronto. Nothing fancy, just two people making a promise that has lasted a lifetime.

That July I drove back to Tampa International Airport. Same gate. Only this time I wasn’t picking up a visitor.

I was bringing home my wife.

We built a good life together. We raised our two sons, and my daughter visited us often. We were a happy, blessed family.

Every so often I still think about that drive. I went looking for an elderly woman in green. Instead I found my best friend and my partner for life.

That’s how the blessings that change you usually come, disguised as ordinary days you don’t recognize until you look back.

What God has joined together, let no one separate. (Matthew 19:6)