The month of September is particularly resonant for me. As some faithful readers may recall, it was on September 16, 1966, a Friday, that I first met Wendy, in a classroom at Chico State College in Northern California (now California State University, Chico). On September 14, 1968, Wendy and I were married in Chico. The wedding took place on a Saturday morning. After a small reception at Wendy’s parents’ home, we set off for Santa Barbara.
During the summer, I had transferred to Westmont College and would start classes there the following week. My brother, Rick, followed us in a van containing our bed (a wedding present), our dresser (also a wedding present), and other “possessions.” We arrived in Santa Barbara a little after midnight; Rick helped us unpack. And on September 24, 1970, while I was teaching an English class (I taught at Westmont for one year after I graduated), a friend walked in to say that Wendy had been driven to the hospital by another friend of ours, as prearranged, to give birth to our first child, Anna, right on schedule. I made it to the hospital with plenty of time, but in those unenlightened days, husbands weren’t welcome in the delivery room.
Earlier, when Rick and I were boys in Pomona, California, September was when we started the school year, invariably right after Labor Day. Summer vacations were longer then than they typically are now, and we relished them. We didn’t at all dislike school, but we loved having the extended break. We spent a good deal of every day together. Most summers, there would be a camping trip: Rick and I and Mom and Grandma would head for somewhere in the mountains with our Uncle Ed (Mom’s brother) and Aunt Ardith and their children, our cousins, all of whom we liked. I disliked camping itself and especially hated the drives to and from wherever we were going (I was routinely carsick), but I loved the companionship (especially when I was a little older and could talk with Uncle Ed). Each of the summer months had its own character, and that was part of the charm.
I don’t intend to romanticize that time in contrast to the present—not at all. But I am struck by how different our childhood was from that of kids growing up today. Of course, our particular experience, while typical in some ways, was also different from that of our classmates. For one thing—one large thing—our parents were divorced (that was finalized around the time I turned five, I think), which was uncommon at the time among the families we knew through school and church (“churches,” plural, I should say, because we changed churches fairly often).
An important change, which I have mentioned here in the past, took place halfway through the year when I was in fourth grade and Rick was in first grade. Our mom decided to move us from the public school near our home to a Missouri Synod Lutheran School in Pomona, St. Paul’s. This turned out to be a wonderful decision. We weren’t Lutherans, we were deep-dyed Baptists, but our years at St. Paul’s were a blessing to us in countless ways. Not least, for the first time we were in a setting where “church history” mattered (the Baptist churches where we had worshiped over the years were deeply ahistorical) and where we were exposed to liturgical traditions. In other ways, too—not least, a couple of exceptional teachers—the school was a very good place for us to be. Even now, age seventy-six, I recall the sense of expectation I felt (over the Labor Day weekend) as a new school year was about to begin.
Again, I am not writing about all this to wax nostalgic (though I treasure many memories from those days) nor to lament the very different circumstances of kids like Rick and me growing up today, in a world we couldn’t have imagined back then. Rather what I feel, right now, is an overwhelming sense of strangeness. How did we get here? Where are we headed? I can’t imagine.
One more thing about Septembers past. In 1994, I was hired by Christianity Today to start what became Books & Culture. After much planning, the first issue, September/October 1995, duly appeared. Pedants may note that the issue hit the streets late in August. But I was delighted by the timing.
John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.
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Image by Daryl Mitchell, from Flickr, via Creative Commons licensing. Image cropped.
