Blind Date and Life Ever After

Another Way for week of June 9, 2023

Blind Date and Life Ever After

What does it take to marry someone who is totally blind or with some other challenge?

Ferne Bowman is a woman I have only recently learned to know a bit, even though her piano-tuning husband, Dan, came into our home and tuned our piano for many years. I always enjoyed fascinating conversations with Dan as I drove him to his next piano tuning job.

The Bowman team—and long marriage of over 50 years—is nothing short of remarkable. I have just finished reading Ferne’s memoir, Song of the Redwing Blackbird: An Amish Mennonite Girl Grows Up. Earlier I read and reviewed Dan’s memoir in my column, From Sight to Insight: A Mennonite Farm Boy’s Adventures Through Blindness to Living and Seeing Without Vision. Today I’ll focus on Ferne’s story.

I truly enjoyed reading Ferne’s book as she began each chapter—many of them brief—with a story or adventure or encounter from her childhood and long years of living. She writes very well and gives a good example of how to write an entertaining memoir. She also fills the book with photos illustrating many stories or memories. Both of these things (the stories and the photos) make for easy reading.

Ferne grew up “Amish Mennonite” (sometimes known as “Beachy Amish,” a particular order of Amish faith), and gradually decided to leave the strictness of some practices in that group to a more modern Mennonite group. Today Ferne and Dan are members of a local church in Mennonite Church USA. But Ferne highly values the home in which she grew up even though tragedy and difficulty touched her family early on. I won’t reveal a spoiler here.

One of the rules in her early faith family was that most children ceased formal education after eighth grade, or they were perhaps allowed to attend two years of high school. Families and ministers said that was “enough education” and spurned high school diplomas. Youth rarely went to college unless they wanted to become a teacher.

So it was that Ferne met Dan as a freshman at Eastern Mennonite College in her later twenties, working on a teaching degree. Everyone knew “the blind guy” on campus. And we all know people who have had to live with difficult physical challenges that happen after they have gotten married. But in Ferne and Dan’s case, Ferne knew what she was going to deal with. I should add that Dan is intelligent, outgoing, hardworking, and an excellent conversationalist who is eager to adapt to new technologies that help him cope and communicate.

In the book, she tells of first meeting Dan at the same table in the dining hall at college where the students were assigned tables for a half week at a time, usually three girls and three boys to a table. She doesn’t remember much about the week where Dan was also sitting at her table, but he keenly remembers that Ferne laughed “at one of his smart comments,” which attracted Dan’s attention.

Dan ended up asking her for a date to the Spring Banquet. Most folks are nervous on a first date but Ferne needed to serve as a guide as they walked to the banquet/dining hall. He took her arm, but she accidentally slammed him into a door post by not allowing enough room for him to pass through. The evening ended on a very good note, however, playing some games involving trivia where Ferne was quite impressed with Dan’s “vast knowledge on every subject.”

And that was the beginning of a long sweet courtship and finally marriage and raising their eventual family of three daughters. Ferne says, “To me, he is not a blind man: he’s Dan.” He just happens to never have seen his wife’s face nor the faces of their daughters and grandchildren. But that didn’t matter. Ferne and Dan have carved out a meaningful and fairly ordinary family life which Ferne describes in wonderful detail in her book.

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Tell us about an extraordinary woman, man, child that you know or have met! We’d love to hear.

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Ferne Bowman’s book is available from her home in Harrisonburg, VA 22802. Please contact her by email: fernelappbow@verizon.net  The book is $10.00 plus $1 postage. Or write to me at the address below for Ferne’s mailing address.

Another Way, P.O. Box 363, Singers Glen, VA 22834, or email anotherwaymedia@yahoo.com.

Another Way is a column by Melodie Davis, in syndication since 1987. She is the author of ten books, most recently Memoir of an Unimagined Career. Another Way columns are posted at FindingHarmonyBlog.com a week after newspaper publication.