A Place to Crash Thomas M Parsons

18. A Place to Crash

Our apartment next door to the nursing home was a great place to study, as long as I was the only one home. It also worked fairly well if it were only Joe and me, or Sid and me, or Frank and me. But when we were all there, studying was impossible.

The same thing was true of sleeping. Coming home from school, feeling a little tired, and looking for a place to crash usually led me to the sofa in our living room. But many times someone else had beaten me to it, and I would have to crash someplace else.

Picture this. Four seminarians, all born-again Christians, all Baptists, but eager for theological discussions that would go on all night and solve nothing whatsoever. That was us. We argued virtually every fine theological point ever dreamed up by men of faith and doubt.

Trichotomy? Dichotomy? We hashed it out thoroughly. Could Jesus never sin? Or did Jesus never sin? Was it His nature or His will? We argued that one out. Election? Or free will? We hammered out the fine points of that one. Was Heaven a place? Or a state of mind? How about Hell? Was Jesus half God and half man? How could He be all God and all man?

How could we be sure the Bible as we had it was the true Word of God? Couldn’t there be some errors that had crept in over the years? Wasn’t it just the original manuscripts that had been inspired? But we didn’t have the original manuscripts. Did we have the true Word of God? Would the church go through at least part of the Tribulation? Or all of it? Or none of it? About the only one we didn’t get to was How many angels can dance on the head of pin? That one was easy. Angels, being good Baptists, didn’t dance.

Most of that was just for fun, just a way to let off steam, as it were, after a long day of classes, lectures, and writing papers. None of our discussions changed any of our minds. Sid usually had what I call the stock spiritual answer, the answer always given, the easy answer, the Sunday School answer, the answer everyone knew. Sid was not a deep thinker. As I said, he was a little naive.

Joe usually didn’t have an answer until someone else expressed one, then he would jump on the bandwagon and side with someone, often Sid. Joe was not a deep thinker either. In fact, Joe was not a thinker, period. He knew by rote, by memorization, not by experience or by thinking it through himself. He usually did not even have the “pat” answers Sid often gave. And his support of one person’s point would quickly change when someone else gave a different view. It was not that Joe was lacking conviction. What he was lacking was the ability to think for himself. There was a reason for that. It had much to do with the secret that lie buried in his past for most of that school year.

Often it was Frank who would introduce the topic for the discussion. Usually it would be something just a little left of center, just a little different than what we would normally hear from the Bible teachers in our churches. And very often I would argue the more traditional view against Frank’s slightly liberal view, with Sid providing support with his commonly-known answers, and Joe swinging back and forth between Sid and me and Frank. Frank was stubborn. So was I. Neither of us were super intellectuals, but we both could hold our own in a debate. And we did.

One night Frank was missing his fiancé a little. She was back in Pennsylvania in their home town. I assume that is what prompted his introduction for the theological debate of the evening.

“How far should a Christian go with his girl if they’re engaged to be married?”

Sid, the future chaplain engaged to a nurse back home, said, “You gotta keep it pure, man. My girl says you risk some serious diseases if you mess around.”

“I’m not talking about ‘messing around,’ with just any girl,” Frank said. “I’m talking about you and the girl you know you are going to marry. That’s different, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, keep it pure,” said Joe, who, it seemed, had about as much experience with girls as, well, as I did.

“I think the Bible is pretty clear about not having sex until you are married,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Frank, “but what if you practically are married?”

“The Bible is clear,” Joe said. “You gotta keep it pure.” This went on for some time. Then Frank made a startling revelation.

“My girl and me sometimes pretend we have sex,” he said. “We are fully clothed, but we touch each other through our clothes. I don’t think that is wrong. I mean we are going to be married, and when we are we are going to touch each other without clothes. So why not have a little fun now?”

“Man you are crazy,” Sid said. “That’s bad news.”

“Bad news,” Joe said. “You gotta keep it pure.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

“This past summer, just a little. We both knew we would not be seeing each other much while I was here at school. So we had a little fun before I left. What’s wrong with that?”

“What if you get some disease?” Sid said. “My girl, she’s a nurse, you know, she says it isn’t safe.” Sid apparently believed that germs could work their way through clothing and enter a person’s body through the skin of the fingers. Maybe some of them can.

“I’m not talking about some floozy off the street,” Frank argued. “I’m talking about the woman I am going to marry. She doesn’t have a disease.”

“But it’s not pure,” Joe said.

“What if you don’t marry her?” I asked. “What if something happens and you don’t marry her? Then you are guilty of fooling around with someone else’s wife.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “what if you don’t marry her? What then?”

“My girl says they’re always getting people in their clinic who got a disease from sex,” Sid said.

“You gotta keep it pure,” Joe said. “Or you’ll get something.”

And on it went. We could make one of those discussions last a good part of the night. And the more tired we got, the longer the discussion would go on, and the dumber it would become.

That night I did not believe Frank and his fiancé were actually doing what he said they were. I thought he was just arguing for the fun of it. He often did that. He often took the view he knew would provoke the rest of us. But now, looking back, I am pretty certain they were “fooling around” as Frank said they were.

One day I came home and, as I entered the apartment, something was irritating my nose. It was a familiar smell. I had grown up with it. Frank was smoking a cigarette.

“What are you doing?” I said. “How can you be a pastor if you can’t get rid of a habit like this one?”

“I know lots of pastors who smoke,” Frank said. I’ve been smoking for a long time, since high school. I don’t think it is a problem.”

“Well, it is a problem for me.” I said. “I thought when I left home and my dad’s smoking, I wouldn’t have to put up with that stench anymore.”

“You won’t have to put up with it,” Frank said. “I’ll only smoke in my room.”

“What about Sid,” I said. “Sid is not going to like it. He’s going to tell you about all the diseases his girlfriend says you can get from smoking.”

“Well, I’ll just smoke outside then,” he said. “You won’t have to worry about it.”

I was beginning to wonder how I had gotten into such a group of unlikely seminarians. One rather naive, one rather liberal and one rather strange. And then there was me. Was our seminary full of strange men?

Then it occurred to me. The “normal” guys at school were all married. They had wives. They had gotten past the dating and engagement stages of life. They were, right this minute, at home with their wives. That is what normal men of twenty-four or twenty-five who are called to ministry are doing. I was a loser among losers!

Sid and Frank had fiancés, it was true. But they were not yet married. The “normal” guys got married before they reached our age. We were not normal because no woman had yet actually got us to walk down an aisle and say, “I do.” We were not good “catches.”

One time Joe shocked us all. I do not remember what we were talking about, but he said he had something he wanted to show us. He went to the bedroom I shared with him, rummaged around in his drawer for a few minutes, and came back to the room with a small, white case. “I’m going to give this to the right girl, when I find her,” he said. He opened the box, and nestled inside in white satin was a diamond engagement ring. It sparkled and glistened in the light.

“You mean you bought this for a girl you don’t even know yet?” Frank asked.

“No,” Joe said. “I bought it for the girl I was going to marry. But she,” he paused momentarily, “but we broke it off. Now I’m saving it for someone else.”

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We looked at each other, still convinced that Joe had purchased the ring just on the hope that he would find a girl someday.

“We were engaged,” he said, “for several months. She wore this ring. Then we broke it off.”

None of us dared ask why. We thought we knew why. No normal woman could marry Joe. There was definitely something abnormal about him. He was not dangerous, we knew that. But he was not able to act like a normal adult. He was too childlike, too likely to say the wrong thing, too lacking in the social graces needed by a pastor or a suitor. But there was the ring, and he said she had worn it for several months. How could this be? I had never kissed a girl! That’s right. The strongest physical thing I had ever done was hold hands. But Joe, lacking social skills and being somewhat different had been engaged!

We, that is Sid, Frank and I, often pondered during that time we lived in that upstairs apartment how Joe had gotten where he was. How did he get a degree from a Christian college? Why would any college grant a degree to a man who obviously could not hold a position in ministry, even if he could obtain one? And why did the seminary accept him and allow him to come to work towards a master of divinity degree? And now we had a new question to ponder. How did Joe get engaged?

Fall in Grand Rapids, as it is wont to do, quickly turned to winter. Our first semester in seminary was quickly drawing to a close. And one day early in December my little white Valiant and I headed east on Fulton away from the apartment toward the East Beltline. In my briefcase was a paper that was due for church history class. There was snow on the ground — there usually is in Grand Rapids in the winter — but it was not fresh, and the roads were dry and clear.

I turned north on the Beltline. In 1965 the Beltline was a two-lane undivided highway that became four-lane and divided where it crossed Interstate 96. It then reverted back to two-lane before it approached the campus. When driving north, one encountered a wide, sweeping curve in the Beltline just before it widened and divided at the interstate highway.

As I entered the curve, I saw a string of cars in the opposing lane approaching. The speed limit then was 65 mph, even though the Beltline was definitely not built to expressway standards, and, indeed, was not an expressway. The cars approaching were no big deal. There was usually a lot of traffic on the Beltline at quarter to eight in the morning. But then I saw something that was not supposed to be there. As I started around the curve, I saw a green car approaching in my lane. The driver was apparently passing the string of cars.

It is strange how we are able sometimes to meet a challenging — indeed, a frightening — situation with calmness and control. I started to slow down instinctively. I kept my eye on the car which continued approaching at full speed. I knew I could not go to the left into the path of oncoming cars. But if I stayed in my lane, a head-on collision was inevitable. I figured a head-on collision might ruin my day, so I decided to avoid it. I would drive off the road to the right onto the shoulder and let the driver-with-no-brain continue on his way.

I steered onto the shoulder, but at the same instant Mr. No Brain made a sharp left turn into an embankment on the side of the road. He stopped rather quickly, but now I was headed straight for the right rear area of his green Chevrolet. If I turned left back onto the road, I might veer into traffic. I kept my foot on the brake and plowed my valiant little Valiant into the back of his Chevy. The sounds no one likes to hear reached my ears and then went to my brain. My day was ruined.

When everything settled, I was out of my car, walking around seeking to do whatever I could. Mr. No Brain didn’t get out of his car. Several streams of blood ran down from the top of his head, and he was quite shaken up. A state patrol car happened by, but the officer said this was not his jurisdiction. He called the Grand Rapids police, and an ambulance because of the blood on Mr. No Brain’s head. He then decided to take Mr. No Brain to the hospital rather than waiting for the ambulance.

When the police arrived, they noticed that I was limping. There was blood on the knee of my good suit pants that I had worn to classes that day. Just about then the ambulance arrived, the one that had been summoned for Mr. No Brain. The police decided I should go in the ambulance to have my knee looked at. They would come to the hospital later to get my statement, and they would summon tow trucks to haul away Mr. No Brain’s Chevrolet and my valiant little white car.

I saw him again in the hospital. He still had a bloody head, but apparently it wasn’t as bad as it looked. I, on the other hand, had a hairline fracture of my right kneecap, according to the x-rays. My car did not have a seatbelt in it; seatbelts were relatively new in 1965, and my car was of pre-seatbelt vintage. On impact, I had slid forward and my knee had hit the steering column, causing the fracture. I would need to wear a wrap around bandage on my leg for several weeks to keep it stiff so that the fracture would heal. But there was a problem. Since I was a student, and did not have a local doctor, they had to wait for the school’s doctor to come and put the bandage on.

I knew the school did have a physician, a Dr. Smith, who was a Christian and who had his own full-time practice. He provided service for students as needed. He would be at the hospital later that morning to see his patients, and would take care of me then. In the meantime, I could rest there in the examining room. They pulled the curtains to give me some privacy, since I was in my underwear, and had been since shortly after they brought me in. I thought I would close my eyes and drift off for a few minutes, but anyone who has ever been in a hospital emergency room knows that sleep is not something that happens there.

There were other patients around me in adjoining examining rooms, separated from me by thin cloth curtains that undulated as doctors and nurses moved around on the other side of them. Conversations from the other sides of the curtains were clear and sometimes explicit. “Did your bowels move yet?” was a question the nurses seemed to enjoy asking the patient who had no choice but to give details of the most personal nature to a stranger, and to me, since I could not help but hear from my side of the curtain.

While I was waiting for the good doctor, a policeman entered, carrying my briefcase that was supposed to be with me at school, not here in the hospital. He had removed it from my car. He told me that Mr. No Brain had been going hunting, with his dog in the car, and thought he was still on the four-lane portion of the Beltline when he started passing the string of cars. When he saw me approaching, and realized he was now back on the two-lane portion of the highway, he made that sharp left turn into the embankment. His car, a brand new Chevrolet, was totaled. The officer was not certain what happened to the dog.

My car had been taken to a holding place, and I would have to make arrangements with my insurance company to have it taken somewhere for repair. The officer seemed to think it was repairable. I thought that was pretty good, that my little 1963 Plymouth Valiant beat a 1965 Chevrolet. The officer said it was a good thing that I had moved onto the shoulder and reduced my speed significantly before impact. He also said if my car had been equipped with a seatbelt, and I had been wearing it, I probably would not have been injured at all.

He gave me some papers to sign, and he left. I thought I could get a little nap in before doc showed up, but that was not to be. A pretty nurse about my age came in, with me sitting on the table in my underwear. I was a little embarrassed by that, but she didn’t seem to be. She was carrying a tray that contained a vial with some clear liquid inside. Next to the vial was a needle, what looked to me like a long needle. She said I had to have a tetanus shot, and she said she would not look, since I was in my underwear. I took a look at the needle and said, “With that needle, you’d better look!” At least she didn’t ask me if my bowels had moved.

Finally, the doctor came and looked at my leg and at my x-rays and decided that the doctor who had examined both earlier was correct. I needed a bandage that would wrap tightly around my leg from about mid-thigh to mid-calf. It would keep my leg from bending at the knee. I would need to use crutches until the knee healed enough to support my weight. Then he shaved my leg.

I had never had my leg shaved before. He did not do a great job; he nicked me a couple of times. But soon my leg was as smooth and bare as any young lady’s leg would be. The shaving was necessary, he said, because it would allow the adhesive on the bandage to stick to my leg. The full length of the bandage would be stuck to my skin for about a month. Over the bandage Doctor Smith wrapped another bandage, the kind old people wear to improve circulation.

Finally, about noon, I was finished and ready to go home. A nurse brought my clothes and asked me who I would like to have her call to come and get me. I gave her my roommates’ number, and she left. I got into my clothes, which was not easy, you understand. It is a challenge to push an unbending leg through the leg of a pair of pants.

It was Fran who came and got me. It was well after one o’clock when I got to the apartment. I had had nothing to eat since 7:00 that morning. I was hungry, but not very, and I had a headache. I ate a sandwich or something, and laid down on my bed for awhile. Finally sleep came. That night I asked the couple downstairs if I could use their phone to call home to tell my parents about the accident. I reversed the charges, and my mother answered.

I imagine it was a shock to her, given her experience just eighteen years earlier with my brother Ron when I informed her, “Mom, I had an accident today.”