A girl like you

I should have known better with a girl like you

That I would love everything that you do

And I do, hey, hey, hey, and I do.

By John Lennon, Paul McCartney

For two weeks, a girl sat on the back of the common lounge sofa whenever I played Hearts or Spades with the other guys in the dorm. At first, I took no notice. Then gradually, her presence penetrated my lame-o brain.

The games were a focus after classes and before the assigned readings. They lowered our stress and bonded us in a way I doubt any other activity would. Well… except for my trains.

I’m a train nut, a railfan extreme, and I brought my HO set with me. After doing the normal thing with loops and switches, we decided to rewire one of the locomotives, swapping the connections so it ran the opposite direction. The other locomotive, we left alone.

Then we laid 35 feet of straight track from corner to corner of the lounge. I felt like Gomez Addams as I eased the transformer circuit to “run.” Across the lounge both locomotives charged, and BAM!—they collided in the middle. We whooped and hollered.

Okay, yeah… we did it time after time… until finally one of them suffered a catastrophic breakage.

After putting the poor things in their coffins and all the tracks away, we went back to our card games. The same girl came out and sat behind me. I looked up from the game long enough to introduce myself.

The thing is, it was my first quarter in a dorm. It was January, so I was the new guy to a bunch of wild masculine beasts who inhabited other rooms on the men’s side of the building. I’d graduated from community college, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with college, but this dorm thing…

And it turns out, this girl was also in her first quarter in the dorm and was equally feeling her way in developing relationships. She was almost exactly two years younger than me.

At the urging of the other guys, I had started dating a number of girls from other floors in our dorm and from the other dorms. Sometimes the dates went fairly well, sometimes they were failures.

I was the entertainment editor of the campus newspaper, so I got free tickets to every band that played concerts in our field house. Some of the dates were to these, but often I was focused on what I would write about the performances. I wasn’t really trying to be good company and dating sometimes took a back seat.

Finally, it occurred to me that I should take this girl, my new friend, to see The Doobie Bothers. I remember how I started the article—“I have to apologize to you readers, but I was making out in the bleachers and missed the show.” Thirty-five years later, the editor told me he still had a copy of that review and thought it was the best thing anyone had ever written.

She thought the concert was fabulous, to my surprise when I compared her reaction to some of my other dates. I really hadn’t made out with her, because I had my notebook out writing thoughts about the concert. The review was a joke I played on the newspaper staff.

She turned out to be the one for me. As The Beatles sang, “I should have known better with a girl like [her].” We kept dating, until finally the other guys started calling her “the wife” when they teased me about the relationship.

“The wife”—that had a pleasant ring to it. I started including her in everything I did. That summer, Spokane held its Expo ’74 World’s Fair. Naturally, I got a press pass to enter the fair grounds whenever I wanted. I took her with me and together we looked at everything the various countries had on display.

Somehow in my various escapades when I dropped out of college to do weird things like working for the state legislature, I set myself back a year of studies. So it was no surprise when she announced that she was graduating in 1975, while I still had a year left to earn my degree.

Even though I knew it was inevitable, it was still like a blow to my gut. Over the past two years, she had become more than the girl who sat on the back of the couch watching me play Spades. She was truly the one that I wanted to spend my life with. And now her ship was sailing away.

But her ship only sailed as far as a small town northwest of Spokane, about 150 miles away, close enough that I could drive my clunker Mustang there in a few hours. We spent every other weekend together. The romance continued to bloom.

By the time I graduated, she had signed a contract to teach for another year in the same small town. I went back to my parents’ house on the other side of the mountains to send out resumes and search for a newspaper job. We didn’t visit during those three months, and it was hard on us.

When I did get a job, it was in southern Idaho, 800 miles from where she taught. There was no air service to her small town, and plane tickets were expensive. We only flew to see each other twice in the first year. I flew up to Spokane once and she came down from Spokane once.

I remember pulling over on the airport’s perimeter road after she flew home… sobbing. That’s when I realized this was permanent—she was the right girl for me. Once again, I remembered the lyric to The Beatles song, “I should have known better.”

For her third year teaching, she got a job in southern Idaho so we could be together. We planned a wedding in her hometown, and bought a manufactured home to live in. I worked for that newspaper for another two years.

Then something happened that made me fall out of love with my job in Idaho, so I got another job. This time it was back in central Washington. Once again, she was locked into a teaching contract, now slightly more than 500 miles away.

I set up an arrangement with the publisher to take Friday afternoon off as comp time for the evening hours I spent covering town council and PUD board meetings.

Then I would dash down to southern Idaho in my beater Mustang, spending Friday evening and Saturday, and leaving late Sunday night—driving all night to be at work Monday morning. I often pulled over to grab quick naps before I had an accident.

During those times away, living in a lonely apartment, I wrote a lot of poetry, some of it about her, and some of it with anecdotes from my life. I often wished I’d continued to play the guitar after I healed from cutting part of my finger badly in an industrial paper cutter at the state legislature. I think I would have made a pretty good song writer.

When she started teaching special ed in that small town, she found that the local Indian reservation bused their neuro-diverse students down to her classes. Because of that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs waived her student loan. At the same time, I had saved all of my legislative earnings, so I had enough to go to college without a student loan. The best wedding gift we got was starting married life debt-free.

It has been 47 years since we got married and 50 years since I sensed that a lonesome girl was sitting on the back of my sofa every night when I played cards. As with any longtime marriage, there have been rough times and good times.

We have two children who were a joy to parent as they grew up and a joy to be good friends with now that they are living their own adult lives. They’ve had children of their own, so we sit in our rockers as grandparents.

On our 40th anniversary, our son gave us tickets to see The Eagles with an opening act of—The Doobie Brothers. He knows they were our first date together. This time, we didn’t make out in the bleachers. We cheered and clapped for every old familiar song.

So “I should have known better” as life progressed that I would marry the right girl and we would spend our lives in love.

That when I tell you that I love you, oh

You're gonna say you love me, too, oh

And when I ask you to be mine

You're gonna say you love me, too