It's All About Him (5 page)

I managed to find my breath. “Yes!” I said. “I just don't want it to be right away.”

My Parents' Blessing

As surprised as my parents were, they were all for it. They had seen how responsible, loving, and determined Alan was. After all, he had worked, saved, and gotten a bank loan in order to give me a car for my high school graduation. Most twenty-year-olds just didn't do things like that. My dad gave his blessing in a pretty low-key way, repeating to Alan what my mother's father had said to him many years before: “Yes, Alan, you can have Denise's hand in marriage . . . but if you ever get tired of her, just bring her back!”

Mice on the Cake

The following December, when I was nineteen and a sophomore in college, we were married at the First Baptist Church in Newnan. Although I had grown up in Unity Baptist Church, we had started attending Alan's church and decided to be married there. The church was decorated for Christmas with two evergreens at the front, both with white lights. The windows were filled with magnolias and greenery, with baskets of red and white flowers on either side of the altar. The massive crystal chandeliers were dimly lit for the evening ceremony, and the church was filled with friends and family.

Alan wore a black tuxedo with a black bow tie—no Stetson—and according to the wedding announcement in the
Newnan Times-Herald,
I wore “a formal gown of imported nylon organza”—I never knew that nylon was imported—“with pearled and bugle beaded Chantilly lace.” The local newspaper went on and on: “The long fitted sleeves trimmed with matching lace ended in points at the wrists and the A-lined skirt swept to a full chapel train. The bride wore a fingertip length mantilla and carried a linen handkerchief edged with tatting made by the groom's maternal grandmother.”

Just after our vows, Alan turned to me and sang “That's the Way,” a wedding song by Pat Terry.

With this ring I thee wed and I give to you my life
Mine is yours and yours is mine
And we can live that way forever
With this kiss we will seal that we now are man and wife
Two in one, one in two
That's the way it's got to be

He may not have been nervous about getting married, but he was nervous about singing in front of our two hundred guests.

My parents hosted our reception. Since this was a Baptist church wedding in a dry county, there was no alcohol. (Neither of our fathers would have approved of it anyway.) We had homemade cheese straws and mints, mixed nuts, and a traditional white wedding cake with a little plastic bride and groom on top. They looked slightly confused, standing there in the icing, unsure of their future. The groom's cake was chocolate and decorated with red icing poinsettias and, oddly enough, a mouse bride and a mouse groom on top, standing under an arbor of icing mistletoe. I'm not sure what the little mouse couple had to do with anything, but we were young, and maybe we thought they were cute.

We spent our first night in Atlanta at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel. We walked a few blocks to a Steak and Ale to eat. Even though my sister had packed us a treat box from the reception, we were starving for real food. The next day we headed to north Georgia in a Thunderbird demonstrator that Alan had gotten from his job selling cars. It had a blue leather interior and pushbutton controls, and we cruised along in style, listening to Ronnie Milsap's latest hit, “Nobody Likes Sad Songs.”

We arrived at our destination, a lodge that claimed to be the southernmost ski resort in the United States. Accordingly, it had absolutely no snow, real or artificial. We tooled around the area, visiting antique shops, and ate at the locally famous Dillard House, which serves Southern food family-style. This means that you sit with people you don't know, at large tables, passing large bowls of food, just like you were family. Alan, never one for chatting it up with strangers, absolutely hated it.

Getting Started

As we headed back to Newnan for Christmas, I was excited about being married. I felt that Alan would be a good husband, and believed that I had made the right decision. We were both so young, though, that I still can't believe no one encouraged us to wait awhile. If I had it to do over, I still would have married Alan, but I would have lived on my own first. I went straight from living at home, dependent on my parents, to being married to Alan, dependent on him . . . though I wasn't a slouch, since I was caring for our home, taking a full load of college classes, and working part-time as a bank teller.

Everyone enters marriage with expectations, or at least unexpressed assumptions. Our marriage models were our parents, who had worked hard, kept their vows, and sustained marriages that lasted for a lifetime. So we both believed, without even articulating it, that marriage was for life.

Like many young girls, I had a bit of a Cinderella complex. If my part was simply to play the role of the girl to be swept off my feet by the handsome prince, I looked to Alan to make everything work in our life together. Not that he was born to royalty— far from it—but Alan had the knack for making things happen. He seemed to instinctively envision what could be and move toward that goal. I knew that by his side I would be going somewhere.

People always told us we were made for each other. And in some ways, perhaps that increased my dependence on Alan. I didn't feel complete without him; I relied on him for my sense of well-being. This dependence grew over the years, and in some ways my personal growth stalled. I wasn't thinking about growing as a person, nor was I growing in the only thing that could truly sustain me, a faith in Christ. I was just thinking about what would make me happy. And the more I sought happiness for its own sake, the more it eluded me.

Chapter 6
HIGH HOPES

My first love was an older woman
There's been many since
But there'll never be another
Built in 1955, snowshoe white, overdrive
I never should've sold her, I'll always love her . . .

Alan Jackson, “First Love,”

A
s Alan and I started our new lives together, he proved his love for me by letting go of the “older woman” he had treasured since he was fifteen.

By this I mean, of course, the little white Thunderbird that Alan and his daddy had restored so carefully, the car that symbolized his youth, that car that he truly loved as much as a human being really can love a car. At any rate, he sold his T-bird for ten thousand dollars, which became the down payment for our first house.

Our church was getting ready to tear down a small, turn-ofthe-century home across the street to make room for additional parking. Alan struck a deal with the church leaders to give us the house if we paid to have the lot cleared. After the movers removed the house's foundation and roof and cut it in half, we moved our “new” house to six acres in the country,where we had it reassembled and restored.

Alan was an incredibly hard worker and a great provider, but his sense of humor was a little twisted. One night he was working a late shift, and I was at home, relaxing after a hard day. I had filled our old bathtub with hot water, and I was mostly submerged, eyes closed, blissfully enjoying the moment.

Then I heard footsteps in the house. I'd lost track of time, but it seemed too early for Alan to be coming home from his second-shift job. And usually he called my name when he came in.

Still in the tub, I froze. The steps drew closer to the bathroom, and then they stopped. I watched in horror as the old knob on the bathroom door began to turn, turn, turn. Then the door opened a crack. A hand reached slowly in and snapped off the light switch, leaving me in total darkness.

The only thing that saved me from having a fatal heart attack at that moment was the fact that I had recognized my husband's long hand as it reached in the door. I jumped out of the tub, pulled a towel around me, and started screaming at Alan to
never, ever
do something like that again.

Later someone actually did break into our home and steal almost everything we had. Because of Alan's night hours, there was no way I was going to stay there any longer. We sold that little house and bought another one in town. A year later, we bought the next house, renovated it, and repeated the process. Meanwhile I worked at the bank and took a class load that would allow me to complete my degree in three years rather than four.

Second Grade All Over Again

I finished college, got my teaching certificate, and eventually taught second and third grades at Atkinson Elementary School, the same school I had attended as a girl. Some things there had not changed. For example, I partnered with one of my former teachers, but I couldn't bring myself to call her by her first name. So I called her Mrs. Mann, just like I did when I was eight years old.

The kids, however, seemed quite different from my memories of my elementary friends. They were much wilder than we had been. I came in on the first day of school with all my handmade learning games, neatly organized and laminated. My lesson plans were ready to roll, the classroom was creatively decorated, and I knew this was going to be the best learning environment these kids could hope for.

By the end of the first day, however, the room was in shambles, my games were strewn everywhere, I was a mess, and I didn't think any of us would make it through the year.

But we did, and I grew to love the kids, particularly the ones who came from disadvantaged backgrounds. They were so hungry for love and attention, just as we all are.

Sweat Equity

Alan had dropped out of college so he could work full-time to support us while I was still in school. Over the years, before he broke into the music business, he sold cars, built houses, did carpentry, and took tests to be an air-traffic controller, a postmaster, and an airline baggage handler, though none of these jobs was his life's ambition. He drove a forklift at the Kmart warehouse, a huge distribution center that supplied the surrounding stores with merchandise. On the weekends he played at clubs and at special events with Dixie Steel.

Alan quickly had enough of unloading boxes at the Kmart shipping dock. When we'd talk about our future, he already knew that he would love to sing for a living.He had seen how big goals could be realized when two of his friends from Newnan, Doug Channell and Bubba Whitlock, had dreamed of becoming pilots. It wasn't the norm among our small circle of friends back then to leave town to pursue your dreams; most people stayed in Newnan, some doing what their daddies had done. But Doug and Bubba had worked hard, gotten their pilots' licenses, signed with an airline, and taken off for the wild blue yonder.
If they can get to where they wanted to go
,Alan thought,
I can do it too
.

OVER THE YEARS, BEFORE [ALAN] BROKE INTO THE MUSIC BUSINESS, HE SOLD CARS, BUILT HOUSES, DID CARPENTRY, AND TOOK TESTS TO BE AN AIR-TRAFFIC CON-TROLLER, A POSTMASTER, AND AN AIRLINE BAGGAGE HANDLER . . . HE DROVE A FORKLIFT AT THE KMART WAREHOUSE.

But it wasn't until we bought tickets to several country music shows in nearby Franklin, Georgia, that he really started to seriously consider music as a career. The first show we attended featured “The Kendalls”; another was “The Whites,” a father/ daughter group that included Ricky Skaggs's wife, Sharon. Alan loved these shows. We also saw George Strait, a real cowboy, whose career and songs greatly influenced Alan back then . . . and Alan still holds George in extremely high esteem today.

In early 1985, one of my closest friends I had taught with, Margie Moore, urged me to join her in becoming a flight attendant. She had left her teaching job the previous year to work for Piedmont Airlines. I had never even flown in an airplane, so becoming a flight attendant sounded exotic and sophisticated. Plus, the pay was higher, and the hours shorter, than teaching.

So the next thing I knew I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, for three weeks of flight training with Piedmont Airlines. This was back in the old days of air travel, long before stringent security and the tight rules of the post–September 11 world. Back then, flying still had a certain panache to it . . . particularly for me, since this was so foreign to the down-to-earth world in which I'd grown up.

Around this time, Alan bid the Kmart a less-than-sad farewell and quit his night job. We sold our house, and while I was away for flight training, he moved to nearby West Point Lake, taking up residence in an old trailer we used as a weekend getaway.

Every morning he got in our little boat and zipped across the lake to the marina where he was working. In the evenings he came back and put a burger or two on the grill. Sometimes he had a melody in his head all day, and that night he'd play the guitar and work out the lyrics. It was a lonely time for him, but one in which he had unprecedented time and solitude to develop his songwriting skills.

A “Chance” Encounter