Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 15, 1995 TAG: 9502150080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Judi Taylor typically isn't someone who jumps into things.
At the video store, she takes forever to choose a movie. At restaurants, she always asks the waiter to come back three or four times. And the first time she got married, she knew the guy for years before finally taking the plunge.
But all that was before Vermont, before last month.
Vermont is where Taylor, of Vinton, lived for a time a few years ago with her daughter, Sydney. As part of her mission work for Waverly Place Baptist Church in Roanoke, she had moved there to help another Baptist church get started in the small city of Rutland.
Taylor loved Vermont, but, in 1991, she moved back to Virginia because she couldn't sell her home in Vinton and she couldn't find reliable renters.
Recently, Taylor, 46, had been thinking about returning to Vermont. She mentioned this to a friend who is a pilot for USAir, and he surprised her this past Christmas with two round-trip airline tickets.
On Jan. 13, she used the tickets, taking along her daughter, who was on winter break from George Mason University. Taylor, an administrative assistant for the Grief and Loss Counseling Center at Good Samaritan Hospice, said she was going to use the trip to decide whether she wanted to move back to Vermont. She even lined up several job interviews.
Romance was far from her thoughts.
In Vermont, a church friend named Frank Kramer was to pick them up at the airport, but Kramer, an older member of the church, doesn't like to drive. So, he asked another member of the church, Glen Burbaugh, to drive.
Taylor said there was no matchmaking going on.
"He was just somebody to drive."
Burbaugh later told Taylor he immediately asked himself: "God, who have you sent into my life?"
She said, "He told Frank that he had just met his family, that he was going to marry me."
The next night, Kramer gave a dinner for some of the church members at his home. Again, Burbaugh, 43, was there. He gave Taylor a gift, a wooden basket decorated with pigs that he had crafted. The day before, she had mentioned that she collected decorative pigs.
"I just thought, what an incredibly sensitive man he was."
That is why she turned to him for help later that night when her daughter became ill. Two years earlier, her daughter, 19, suffered a stroke caused by a brain disorder that had gone undetected since birth. Taylor thought maybe her daughter was having another.
Burbaugh drove them to the hospital.
"He was there every morning and every night after that."
Still, there was no romance. In fact, Taylor had long ago resigned to living a single life. "With Sydney sick, my life has been spent in and out of hospitals. My total concentration has been on her and getting her off to college," she said.
"I had made the comment that I would probably be single forever and I was fine with that."
Her first marriage ended in divorce 10 years ago. It had lasted 14 years.
Burbaugh, a graphic designer and woodworker, has been married twice before. His first wife died in a car accident while he was in Vietnam. His second marriage ended in divorce.
Sydney remained in the hospital the next four days. When she was released, it was the day before they were set to return to Virginia.
That afternoon, Burbaugh drove Taylor to several of the places she had wanted to see on her trip, including a lake she often visited when she lived there.
"He had remembered every place that I had said I wanted to go."
At the lake, they talked about her coming back to Roanoke. She had missed her job interviews, and she had decided the time wasn't right for her to move back to Vermont. "That's when he told me he didn't think he could let me go."
He told her he loved her.
"I knew I cared, but I wasn't ready to say that. ... I mean, this was a fairy tale. It only happens in 'Pretty Woman.' I said, 'How can you say that? You don't even know me.'" They had not even kissed.
She came home the next day.
"I figured I would never see him again."
The first day she was home, he called her twice. He called her twice the next day, and it was then that she told him she loved him back. They talked twice a day after that for two weeks, for a half-hour every morning and three hours at night.
On Feb. 3, he drove to Vinton to visit her. She had the flu. "I was sick as a dog," she said. "He had been there maybe 45 minutes and asked me to marry him. And if anybody could ask someone to marry him looking like I did that day ... so I said yes."
She said, "It was perfect. It was right. If there had been a justice of the peace in my den that day, I would have married him right then." Finally, they shared their first kiss. "We just took a chance with him catching the flu."
Four days later, he returned to Vermont. They set a wedding date for March 3 in Roanoke. They also decided that he would move here, rather than having her move there.
Tuesday, appropriately Valentine's Day, he arrived in Virginia to stay. Until the wedding, he will live with some of her friends and look for a job. They are planning a weekend honeymoon at Bernard's Landing at Smith Mountain Lake.
Taylor said some of her friends have expressed concern.
"I appreciate that and I can understand, but there's absolutely no doubt," she said.
She laughs when people ask if he could be after her money.
"He's going to be real disappointed if he is."
So, why wait?
"Life is very, very precious, and I don't want to waste one more day when I can spend it with him."
by CNB