Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

If Mea was my closest childhood friend, another has been my closest friend ever since. As the most complex and revealing of all friendships, marriage more than any other shows us God. . . and shows us ourselves. Without John my journey would have been unimaginably different. And it was a literal journey that brought us together.

It was August 16, 1947, the Queen Elizabeth's first night out of New York Harbor. From the deck a few days later I would watch England emerge through the mist, with that strange sense of coming home. But that first night I was mostly absorbed in finding my way around the huge ship.

When the dinner gong sounded, I followed a stream of passengers through a confusion of stairways and corridors to the Tourist Class dining room. A group fare for the passage had been booked by the University of Delaware for thirty-two Geneva-bound students from schools all over the country; in the large room I spotted several tables marked Delaware Group. I found a place at one of these and exchanged names with the others sitting there.

My seat happened to face the glass partition through which people entering the dining room could be seen. I was gazing idly at them, couples with children, men in uniform, a group of elderly women, when among the arriving diners I saw a tall, thin, sandy-haired man in his mid-twenties.

That is the man I will marry.

It was too sudden, too certain, to be a thought. It was simply knowledge. A fact, the way the glass partition was a fact, and the slow swaying of the ship. I sat dumfounded. I didn't believe in "mystic" experiences; they certainly weren't Unitarian and I would have been horrified to think I was having one.

"No!" I told the fact that confronted me. "Not yet! I can't get married yet-not for a long, long time!"

I supposed -- I hadn't really thought about it -- that someday I'd get married. But I had so much to do first! I wanted to be a writer. At Northwestern University I'd joined the black students' club, "the Quibblers," its only white member. I'd brought with me on the boat a thick