I hope that the messages posted here are a blessing to you. Of course, before you invest the time to read what I wrote, here is a little introduction to the author – Me – in five stages.
1. Philip Page, Jr. is…Loving the Married Life
My life began when I kissed my best friend. It was supposed to be one of those platonic arrangements generated from my inability to get a date to the annual Black & Gold Ball. It ended with my lips on my best friend’s neck after her roommate kicked us out for excessive slow dancing. I found out that, when you are dancing with the right person, all of the songs by Prince actually make sense.
When you are dancing with your best friend, the entire world makes sense and, during our first date, I couldn’t allow it to end. So we danced at the ball, danced in her dorm room and then, after her roommate kicked us out, danced in the hallway. After that kiss, I fought for our friendship for about two weeks then realized you can’t go back. ‘Closer than Friends’ by the R&B group Surface became our song.
Our best dates were the ones without money. Like when we spent a late evening talking and snuggling in my dorm room after sharing a box of chicken from KFC. It wasn’t the leftover food that made the evening; it was the defiance in holding on to our dorm rooms until the college kicked us out for winter break. We returned back to campus as soon as the school would allow. Upon my return I found out that I was on academic probation and would be asked to leave if my grades didn’t improve. I’m sure it was the thought of being away from Robin – the love of a good woman – that sparked my transition from D’s to A’s.
After four years of dating, and twice being voted Cutest Couple at W&M, I faced the prospect of graduating to a life without my best friend in the world. During my third year at college, my mother moved 2,000 miles away from my dad and my home was no longer the 90 minute drive I use to take to see Robin during the Summer. Once the reality of the commute set in, I scraped together my pizza delivery tips and bought a small ring. I proposed to Robin the day she returned to campus from her best friend’s wedding. We were married four months after graduation.
We honeymooned on our move from Virginia to Oklahoma and continued that honeymoon for the next eight years. We enjoyed good times followed by better times followed by fantastic times. Our love was annoyingly apparent to everyone we met during our time in the Midwest. I can remember one of our friend couples asking me about my relationship with Robin. They wanted to know why our marriage seemed so easy and, by comparison, their year old marriage contained more than its fair share of hiccups. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up with a reason. I remember saying something about our personalities and that Robin and I shared a certain temperament which made us both introspective and thoughtful. Well, that’s what I said.
In our years of marriage, Robin and I have worked on our relationship through books and classes and wisdom from our elders. Some of the advice was extremely beneficial and led to wonderful insights that helped grow our marriage. These insights are the inspiration and first goal behind the blog, ‘Loving the Married Life’. Of course, if we are honest then I have to admit that much of the advice we were given was not great. It was crap. And it took years for me to acknowledge it, unlearn it and call it what it is. So, my secondary goal for ‘Loving the Married Life’ is to protect good couples from bad advice.
Like, when people tell you that marriage takes a lot of work and to not expect continuous good times. Well, as I mentioned before, it is possible for you to have a continuous stream of good times and for those good times to be followed by better times. If you don’t believe it, let us tell you about it. In truth, there was nothing special about me and Robin that preordained a perfect life together. We were simply Loving the Married Life and loving each other. I want to tell everybody.
In this phase of life I want to offer an alternative to the pitiful, prognostications about marriage in our culture (“marriage is hard”…”marriage takes work”…”after seven years…”). After years of bliss, my marriage with Robin still resembles the refrain from a Musiq Soulchild song, “…Baby it’s just you and me against the world.” Except, over the past five years, Robin and I have seen couples that we love, admire and look up to drop off with the rest of the world. My motivation is to draw from my 30 years of marriage to help in whatever way I can.
I’ve always been a writer, although more for therapy rather than publication. However, I sense that there is an opportunity to write about what God has shown me and Robin about marriage and life. I don’t have all the answers – believe me, I don’t. And the things that matter to me won’t all matter to you and yours. But, Robin and I are loving this married life and we want other couples to join us. Cast off the dregs of marriage as an institution and embrace all of the great things about life with your spouse. And if you have forgotten some of the good stuff, spend time reading “Loving the Married Life” so we can remind you.
2. Philip Page, Jr. is…Getting Up Again
In the year that Robin and I graduated from college we moved to Oklahoma to begin the real work of becoming adults. Kind of. We didn’t grow up immediately but we did alleviate my father in-law’s concern about finding jobs. I took a quick job in retail then quit after realizing that “Management Training Program” was a euphemism for ‘work 12 hours a day for 7 days a week for very close to minimum wage’. After a year of that, one of Robin’s friends put in a good word for me and I began my first real job as a software developer at a startup in Tulsa, OK. I think I was employee number 74.
I spent the next six years of my work life elevating through sales, support and software development with intermittent games of foosball and ping pong. Life was good. It was really good until rumors arose that we were going to be sold. I denied the rumors for about six months, and embraced the foolish hope that we would all become millionaires whenever the company was sold. At some point all 330 employees were called into a meeting. I never forgot the candor of the founder. “Well, the company has been sold.” I’m sure he kept speaking but my memory after that is spotty.
I do remember gathering myself and calling Robin. I recall confessing to her, by phone, “Honey, all of the rumors were true…I had denied the obvious truth…the company was sold…I’m unemployed…I’ll be home after class”. Her loving reply was, “Are you alright?” The response from my classmates was not loving, more pity. When I told them that I wasn’t worried about money because the founder had said that he would share the wealth they all looked at me with that “you poor fool” look as if I was the last kid who believed in Santa Claus.
My classmates were more right than wrong. The severance check was about 7 digits short of a million, enough to pay off our cars and use them to find a new job. I did hunt for jobs but that was only after starting two businesses – both failed – and battling non-suicidal depression. After winning the battle against the voices in my head, I wrote a book about my experience titled Getting Up Again. The book was lethargic and provided me with more healing than sales. The best part of the process must have been the book launch party.
There is something blissful about being on stage and seeing all of the people you care about cheering you on. I loved calling out all the names of the people that helped me with the book. I loved the response I got from reading passages from the book. And I loved the big finish when I read about how the book marked the confluence of my personal and professional life. How, on the Friday that I finished writing the book I sat down feeling empty and unemployed. Then, within an hour, I received a call about a job that I was completely unqualified to do. Something about redevelopment and housing. I didn’t really know what it was but I started work the next Monday.
God had opened a big door that led me out of the IT and ecommerce world, into the arena of affordable housing. I didn’t know what a Housing Authority was but I was completely familiar with what they produced – the same government subsidized housing where my mother evangelized throughout my childhood. I had sleepovers there, performed door-to-door solicitations there, received free food there and attended Bible studies there.
Although much of my youth was spent in government subsidized housing, I never lived there. At least not officially. At the end of the day, or the end of the sleepover, I left the projects and went home to my family’s tri-level house. Sometimes my cousins came with me. They would spend the night, or the summer, in our boring, quiet neighborhood. It was a brief respite for them but the suburbs were my home.
From my vantage point of the suburbs, I often pondered the divergence between playing dodgeball in a sleepy subdivision and dodging cars with my cousin in the city. Now, thirty years from the projects, I was hired into a job where I could merge the benefits of urban and suburban living to house America’s neediest families. I had survived a spiritual and geographical journey. I was truly Getting Up Again and finally in position to help others do the same.
3. Philip Page, Jr. is…SuperDad, the Anonymous Hero
If my full time job is to serve America’s neediest families then my individual purpose in life is something more. The truth is that I am a closet superhero. I exist in the shadows with the singular task of protecting the wisdom of the world and the faith of its people. I was given this task by the Creator in a vision in 2003. On November 18th, at about 11 am I heard a voice, a clear audible voice, tell me to leave my job and that my task was about to begin.
Ok, the voice was my wife telling me that she was about to deliver our baby. We named our daughter Faith and, two years later, we named our son Solomon (which means wisdom). So, now I live the life of a superhero, responsible for protecting two of God’s greatest gifts to the world. My heroics aren’t performed in public. My moves aren’t accented by a silk outfit and my conversations aren’t punctuated by quick one liners. But I am SuperDad, the anonymous hero.
I am SuperDad but I am not unique. In my travels I realize that there are many SuperDads, tasked with a similar responsibility to protect and provide for God’s other gifts to this world. Like when my son was about four years old and we were coming out of a crowded church into a more crowded parking lot. My son dropped my wife’s hand and darted down the sidewalk around a parked car. I broke out running along the same street and cut him off after about the third car. He smiled, giggled and then ran back to his mom. I exhaled and, as I went back to join my family I noticed another SuperDad. He acknowledged my heroics with a subtle head nod and a knowing glance.
As my children grow older, I am faced with other challenges. Enemies called puberty, villains called peer pressure and a strange season where I morph into a single parent for one-week stints of time. This new season began when my wife ended her season at home and reentered the workforce on a semi-full time basis. Her superpowers could not be restrained much longer and, after 12 years, it was her time to expose her greatness to the world. I enjoy watching her be great and she enjoys me being SuperDad. I’ve written our stories for other parents to enjoy in this segment, SuperDad – The Anonymous Hero.
4. Philip Page, Jr. is…Black & Right
When my wife and I decided to move from Tulsa, OK, our goal was to allow our children to live on the East Coast. Virginia was where we grew up and enjoyed Southern values tempered by Northern sensibilities. We both spent much of our youth in the Black church, Robin’s family was decidedly Baptist and mine was a more expressive variant of Protestantism that we called Holiness. Both our family’s values mimicked those of the Republican Party. For all things related to God, we tended Right.
The working class reality of our extended families, however, bore no resemblance to the Grand Ole Party. And, when viewed through the lens of a Black, middle class family, the focus moved further left. Our values didn’t change but we saw those values – love everyone, help those in need, do unto others – lived out by Democrats. We were Black people whose faith identified with Republicans, members of the Religious Right who often sided with the Democrats.
When we first moved to Oklahoma, we attended Higher Dimensions Family Church, founded by (then) Pastor Carlton Pearson. Long before having children, we matured as Christians and embraced the socioeconomic soup of ethnicities that made up Higher D. After five years, my pastor decided to run for public office. I recall him explaining the origin of the word ‘politics’ and how there was no conflict in being a man of God and a politician. We trusted and loved him and were excited about his candidacy to become Mayor of Tulsa, OK. Our excitement was challenged but somehow managed to survive perhaps the largest issue with his candidacy.
It took a while to set in but I eventually accepted that our pastor, a Black man leading a largely Black church, was running for public office as a Republican. Perhaps it was only Pastor Carlton Pearson, with his multicultural church, his legacy of racial reconciliation and history of serving the world’s communities, who could pull that off. At least that’s what we thought. Unfortunately, not enough of the voting Republicans in Tulsa agreed. Pastor Pearson did not get enough votes in the primary to present his cause to the general electorate. His brief candidacy, however, did cause me to rethink what I had held true for years. It is possible to identify as Black and vote as a Republican. It’s not highly recommended but it is possible.
Now, more than 20+ years later, I’m not sure who is worthy of my vote. On Juneteenth, I acknowledge the party of Lincoln but, on every other day of the year, I wonder which party furthers the cause of Christ. Do I accept what the Republicans say – their promises of support for the Religious Right – and vote Republican? Do I follow what the Democrats do – their actions to protect the disenfranchised – and vote Democrat? Should I even declare a party or, as Billy Graham famously did, remain politically agnostic in order to present Christ to everyone?
I feel like Mahatma Gandhi when he said, If I ever met a true Christian then I would become one. That’s not actually what he said. He really said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.” but the point is the same. If I ever met a real Republican, one who practiced what the party preached, I think I would shed my Democratic past and join the Party of Lincoln. I guess I want the politics of the Right but I can’t stop seeing their effects through the eyes of a Black man. In the meantime, I remain stuck; writing about the internal conflicts of being Black and Right.
5. Philip Page, Jr. is…Redeveloping the Community
There is a joke in local government. It’s strangely similar to one of those ‘dumb blond’ jokes – one part funny and two parts offensive. The local government joke was told whenever the topic of the meeting was neighborhood planning or community development. We would be viewing a map or a slide show and focusing on a particularly unattractive property in the city – a junk yard in a residential neighborhood or a crack house in a struggling commercial corridor. These properties were often too big for the city to buy and too difficult for the owner to rehab. During a pause in the conversation, while our public sector minds churned, someone would say, “You know what we need…..a well-placed match.” [Cue the awkward laughter.]
The implications of redevelopment didn’t occur to me until I had worked for a few years in the field. My first job was solely focused on community development where my days included neighborhood meetings that led to buying blighted property in emerging neighborhoods then demolishing the structures and building beautiful homes in their place. It became predictable and I didn’t have to really DO any of the real work. My job was to push the paper that made it all happen then, after several months of paper cuts, give a speech at an open house and talk about how we turned a crappy piece of property into someone’s dream home.
Yes, it took a few years for me to realize that the open house celebration where I gave my big speech was like my college graduation. Both events felt like the end of something but it was really just the exciting new beginning of real work that would take a lifetime. In both cases it took years of actual work before realizing that the graduation speech foretold the challenge that was to come. Instead of hearing the message in the speech, we all just cheered and threw our hats in the air like the hard part was all over. But the speaker had a point and the speech was only the beginning.
On one of the early ‘fun’ work days I visited our inner city to inspect a house for my own brand of community development (i.e. demolition). This particular structure was small. It was too small and too shaky to stand. I remember thinking that this house was ready for the wrecking ball, or that well-placed match. Except, when I entered the house there was a mother sitting with her daughter in an otherwise barren room. The stench of burning hair and grease met me at the door as I stood witnessing a ritual, the same one my mother played out with my sisters at least once a week. It was too personal, so familiar that it impaired my ability to view the house objectively. One beautiful, Black mother, and her sweet daughter, had turned a derelict structure into a home. It was filled with code violations and full of love.
My formula for community development – demolish, build, sell, repeat – now reminded me of when I tried to apply basic algebra to calculus problems. The problem was weightier, the tools were incomplete and I was unable to handle the rate of change. It wasn’t long before my discontent, triggered by ineffectiveness, soured relationships at my current employer. So, I changed jobs, changed cities and embraced the knowledge that redeveloping the community meant redeveloping the people within that community.
In my current role I serve as the director of a Virginia-based real estate foundation. I spend my days pushing paper so others can find empowerment, mostly students seeking opportunities in education. I no longer call subsidized housing ‘the projects’ and I no longer joke about arson as the means of building up a community. I actually have a new joke that goes like this. “How do you blow up the projects?” To which I reply, “You build up the people.” [Yes, it’s not very funny but way less awkward.]
So, who is Philip Page, Jr.? Well, I’ve survived Getting Up Again in order to Redevelop the Community while battling Black and Right politics by day and becoming SuperDad, the Anonymous Hero at night. And I can do all of this because I have a fantastic marriage so I’m Loving the Married Life. If any of that sounds interesting to you then, Read On.