What an amazing experience for a farm-girl from North Carolina! Living in Brooklyn, in a sixth-floor apartment with five other C.U.R.E (Christian Urban Renewal Effort) Corps girls was a dream come true. Right away I made a life-long friend, Cher Antonio – now Elferis – who volunteered with the Teen Challenge ministry. She had grown up in Clinton Hill, this historic neighborhood of brownstone-lined streets and rich immigrant culture. She and her dear parents lived just a few blocks away and helped acclimate me to my new city surroundings. Cher was also with me on one of the most important nights of my life, just a month after I had arrived in New York.

The Saturday night outreach service had just ended and members of the staff, Teen Challenge students and visitors from the neighborhood were congregating outside 444 Clinton Avenue, the headquarters of Teen Challenge. It was a hot, humid summer-in-the-city night, and Cher and I were contemplating our options. A young man with a golden tan and sun-kissed blond hair was standing alone, just a few feet from us.

“He’s new…why don’t we ask him to go to Junior’s with us for some cheesecake?” Cher asked in her bubbly Brooklyn with a hint of Jamaican accent.

Maybe he heard her…or maybe he was just friendly. He approached and introduced himself. The name was familiar. Oh, yes, the director had actually asked me to type a letter to him, just a few days after I arrived. The purpose of that letter was to confirm that Randy Johnson, from Buffalo, Oklahoma, a junior at Oklahoma State University, had been accepted to work with C.U.R.E. Corps. And here he was.

I mumbled something about he probably didn’t care to be around us girls, to which he replied, “Oh, I’m used to it. I was a lifeguard this summer.”

“Oh, brother.” I distinctly remember that was the first impression I had of my future husband. Even so, the three of us had an enjoyable time at Junior’s that evening. It soon became evident that God had brought this man into my life to be my something better.

On a snowy December afternoon, Randy telephoned Daddy to ask permission to marry me. A few weeks earlier I had mailed home an introductory letter and some photos, to which Mama had replied, “He’s just what I’ve always pictured for you.” Daddy’s response to Randy’s request was a simple, “yes.” I remember being thankful for this uncomplicated reply. When my sister Rachel’s boyfriend had asked for her hand in marriage, Daddy told him, “You better be good to her. I pitchforked a cow one time for kicking her.” 

That spring Randy and I cobbled together our savings and put a down payment on a Toyota Corolla, which we drove to North Carolina to plan our wedding. We had set a date to marry in August, at the end of our term at C.U.R.E. Corp, but Randy’s younger brother was already planning an August wedding…so we decided to get married in April. 

Randy would stay with us (I would like to make clear that he had a bedroom upstairs and mine was down), and his family would travel from Oklahoma for the wedding.

This is a good place to tell you about Mama’s new house. Ever since I could remember, Mama dreamed of updating our old (somewhat dilapidated) farmhouse. There were new coats of paint, fresh sheets of linoleum, some wall-attached kitchen cabinets to surround an original farmhouse sink, and a bathtub to replace the dungeon-like concrete shower that had always occupied a large corner of the screened porch. We all slept upstairs in the big open attic room. Mama and Daddy’s bed was at one end, separated by the chimney and a walk-through closet from the girls’ sleeping quarters. I had always dreamed of having my own room – like many of my friends – to decorate and organize. We lived in a delightful home, but the house left something to be desired. I do not know if Mama dared dreamed of a new house – even a new, used house.

I think I was almost as thrilled as Mama when she told me that Daddy had purchased the two-story gabled-roof house from our neighbors, the Patterson family. I had admired this house since childhood, and could hardly believe it was going to be ours. How did this happen? The Pattersons wanted to build a new house on the same spot where their current one was located. When Daddy heard they were planning to tear down their old house to accommodate the new one, he offered to buy it and move it to our property. His offer was accepted!

So when I brought my future-husband home from New York, it was to a beautifully refurbished (and in many ways new) house. I had my own bedroom, which Mama had made fit for a princess, complete with pale green shag carpeting, custom drapes and a four-piece laminate bedroom set. Yes, the 70’s are often referred to as “the decade that taste forgot” but to me, it was elegant. We even had two real bathrooms – a proper one with toilet, sink and tub/shower combination all in the same room, and the mudroom for Daddy. Daddy had the movers to relocate our old house behind the barn to use for storage. It is still standing (sort of).

On the day of my wedding, I woke up, looked around my lovely room and felt as if I were in a fairy-tale. That afternoon, at four o’clock, Daddy gave me away in the same church where only a few years earlier he had comforted a broken-hearted 16-year old with the words, “…then God has something better.”

Randy and I moved to Oklahoma so he could finish college and made our home there for the first six years of our married life. We made the 1,200 mile trip home at least once each year. Mother flew out to help me for a week after our son Benjamin was born. When he was a year old, Mama, Daddy, my sister Rodema and her young son William drove out to spend some time with us. Rachel was born in February 1976 and when we visited for Christmas that year, she was already almost a year old. In 1979 we decided to make North Carolina our home. We stayed a year before returning to Oklahoma. I was expecting our third, Amy, and it would be almost two years before we made another trip back to N.C. Even though we lived far away from each other, I always felt close to my parents emotionally. When we visited, it was as if we had never been apart.

Less than two years after we moved back to Oklahoma, Randy was offered the position of director at the Teen Challenge Center in Springfield, Missouri. Benjamin was 7, Rachel was 6, and Amy was 2. We were there five years and Mama and Daddy flew out to visit us in the fall of 1985 – the first time Daddy had ever flown.

Randy and I had a strong desire to return to ministry in New York. In 1987 we were appointed as Urban Missionaries and returned to Burlington for our itineration period of about nine months, before moving our family to Brooklyn, not too far away from where Randy and I had first met. Emily was born just three months after we settled into our basement apartment and began our ten years of ministry in the inner-city neighborhood of Red Hook.

Because we were now only five hundred miles away, we were able to visit every six months or so. Mama and Daddy were both doing well – all things considered – physically and mentally.

In 1995 mother had a stroke and was confined to bed. When we came to visit, there was talk of “putting mother in a nursing home.” Many times throughout my life I had heard Mama say, “Don’t ever put me in a nursing home.” As my three sisters in Burlington were all working full-time, they saw no alternative. Randy and I discussed the situation and he said he would support me if I wanted to stay temporarily and take care of Mama. I was willing, but then another idea impressed me. I asked our daughter Rachel – who at 19 had graduated from high school and was working as an assistant at a Montessori School – if she would be interested in moving back temporarily to take care of Mama. She didn’t hesitate at all to accept the responsibility. When Rachel and I stood by Mama’s bed that evening and I asked her how she would like Rachel to stay and take care of her, she looked at Rachel, smiled and replied, “I thought you might want to do that.”

We moved Rachel down, got her settled, and she provided excellent care for the next two months as Mama’s condition continued to decline. On a late September morning, I was in the kitchen in Brooklyn when the phone rang. In a strained voice, Rachel told me, “Grandma’s gone home to heaven.”  She, my sister Rachel and my Daddy were all by her side as Mama took her last breath. We came down for the funeral and stayed a week to be with Daddy and help him through the initial grief. The night of her funeral, he broke into uncontrollable sobs as I read from John 14. I could not remember ever seeing him cry before that night…but I did recall the tear-stained face he often wore when returning from his prayer times in the barn.

Rachel decided to stay and help Daddy adjust to being alone – for the first time in sixty years. As Christmas approached, I hatched this crazy idea that she and Daddy should travel to New York by Amtrak and spend Christmas with us. It wasn’t easy to work out all the details, but we did. Having Rachel home and Daddy visit with us those two weeks in Brooklyn made the Christmas of 1995 was one of the most memorable of my life. (You can read about Daddy’s visit in three parts – J. Boyd Takes New York in the “Personal” category of the archives.)  

It was during Daddy’s visit with us that I began to notice the changes…changes that would necessitate formulating a plan for his future care. Soon, someone would have to answer the question, “Who will take care of Daddy?”