Chapter 1.2 -- Homecoming Dance -- Work
Chapter 1.3 -- Homecoming Dance -- Crushes (Julia)
I opened the door to my dad's office at the college. "Dad, Mom said you needed ..."
Dad was not in his office.
A very striking woman my age was, however, seated at his desk, working on something that looked like Dad's tests.
"Uh, hi."
"Hello." She turned to greet me and stood up, eyes coming level with mine. She blinked and smiled. "You must be Professor Reeves's son, Joe."
Standing, she was even more striking. Well-constructed, maybe I should say statuesque. She was dressed in a two-layer dress, the sheer outer sleeve of deep blues and reds hinting at the facts of curves the details of which were kept hidden by the inner. The colors brought out the blonde of her hair and the blue of her eyes.
Beauty pageant natural good-looks. Just as attractive as
Lizzie
Ann. The teen-age me would have been looking for a good excuse to turn tail and run.
Some of the women at church dressed similarly for Sunday meetings.
When I was approaching my teens, I'd find myself distracted, trying to discreetly observe the curves hidden, but not really, by the clothes the girls and the women at church wore. (Why do they call that Sunday best? Hemlines. Necklines. Really.) And then I'd have to correct both my thoughts and behavior.
Or not correct, depending on my mood, but I was self-aware enough to understand that looking made it even harder for me to talk with the girls, in addition to making them uncomfortable. And I knew inability to talk with them was not what I wanted.
I didn't know the phrase "objectifying women", but I understood parts of the problem from a practical side.
Somewhere along that time, Elder Packer gave his talk, "To Young Men Only", and I took the counsel about controlling thoughts to heart. It took a few years before I was reasonably able to exercise self-control and was not too distracted to talk with young women my age. And I felt the efforts at self-control definitely made it much less awkward to try to be sociable.
When I was sixteen, I realized I needed to try to refrain from judging ill of the women who dressed in ways to emphasize their curves, who were too willing to cater to fashion more than to sense. Social pressures are a terrible thing. With help from some of my sisters' female friends who chastised me for my Pharisaical attitude towards women who were just trying to look attractive, I figured out that judging them was another thing that made it hard to talk with them -- and another way I had to learn to control my thoughts.
Objectification does seem to be a double trap. As I say, I sort of understood the concept, even if I had yet to become familiar with the term. But, even at twenty-one, I still wasn't quite getting beyond the boundaries of the juvenile interpretation of René Descartes's tautology, "I think, therefore I Am."
It takes practice to communicate with the person you're talking to, instead of with your internal concept of that person, and I had spent most of my practice time through the end of high school immersed in science fiction and fantasy novels. Mostly good novels, but my mom was probably right. Averaging over seventy a year was probably too much, and, while I was exposed to good ideas through such greats as Bradbury, there was too much Heinlein, Clarke, et. al., and way too much of the likes of the Victor Appleton syndicate. Maybe not enough E. R. Burroughs and HG Wells.
George Orwell gave me a headache. Too much of a kind of truth I was unprepared to deal with until I had had time to reflect on the experiences of my mission. But his stuff really wasn't science fiction. Speculative fiction framing an allegory in the case of 1984, and allegorical fantasy in the case of Animal Farm, but not science fiction.
During my mission, I was able to come to somewhat of an ability to ignore the clothes and the makeup and see through the socially enforced elements of presentation to focus on the person. Somewhat, if I were not taken too much be surprise.
(And 1984 might have part of what helped me with that. The scriptures helped a lot, too, of course.)
Anyway, for ten seconds or so I was struggling to keep my eyes from straying. I think I succeeded, but I'm not sure. Only she would know whether where my eyes first went made her uncomfortable, and she never mentioned it.
"Uhm, yeah. That's me." I thought about asking who she was and what she was doing there. Dad hadn't mentioned hiring anyone new, and the students he hired never dressed like this to work for him, at least, not after their first day, that I knew of. Jeans and a tee were the usual.
She didn't make me ask. "I'm Julia. I'm doing some work for your father. He just stepped out."
Right. Sure. No. Something didn't add up.
"Oh. Well, my mom asked me to drop this off for him." I put whatever it was on his desk, in a place where he would see it but it wouldn't be in her way, and tried to make my escape.
"I hear you've just returned from serving a mission in Japan."
I hadn't even gotten myself turned back towards the door. I nodded. "Maa, sore wa sō desu ga."
"That's Japanese?"
"Oh, sorry. Yeah. It means something like 'Well, that's true.'"
"Sounds cool."
"Erm, I guess."
"Uhm, so was it fun?" She paused, as if she were worried she'd said something gauche. "I mean, tell me about it. I've been thinking about doing a youth mission, myself."
"I have no idea what, ..." But I realized I was going to be stuck before I finished out the thought about what she'd think was fun. "You're not from the other ward?"
"Ward?"
"No, I guess not. Uhm, the other congregation. We have two here in Odessa."
"You mean of your church."
"Well ..."
"I'm Baptist."
"Oh."
Not a member of my church. But what was I going to say to that? Beryl was Methodist, and I was still carrying that huge torch for her. If it mattered.
"Guy I used to work for was a Baptist." I chuckle-snorted at my non-seqitur. "Not that I'd expect you to know him necessarily. There are lots of Baptist congregations around, aren't there?"
"Yeah, there are a few."
"Several of the families in the wards here used to attend one or another of the Baptist congregations."
"Did they?" She didn't appear impressed with that line of conversation, either.
"Come to think of it, my best friend, Rodrick, is Baptist."
She shrugged. "Don't know him."
"Well, his mom is. Anyway, I don't know much about what youth missions are like for Baptists."
"You went for two years."
"It's sort of standard for us."
"Our youth missions tend to be much shorter. A few months, maybe half a year at most."
"Oh."
"But we can go more than once."
"Once, for us, and then we're supposed to get finished with college, get started on our ..." I had to pause again. "... careers."
"Families?" She blinked.
"Yeah. Families, too." I did not add that families were supposed to be more important than careers. I didn't want her misinterpreting.
"I guess you spent most of your time witnessing about Jesus? Your dad tells me you believe in Jesus."
"We do. But we spent a lot of our time looking for people who'd listen, and studying Japanese so we could talk to them, too."
"Japanese. That must be hard, witnessing in Japanese."
"It can be. But the Spirit often guides us."
"Gift of tongues?"
"A little bit. Well, yeah, we claim to have a lot of help sometimes."
"Wow." She seemed genuinely impressed.
"Of course God expects us to be diligent, too, but when we've done our part, He fills in the gaps. Sometimes the gaps are pretty big."
"How did you learn all those strange letters?"
I chuckled. "Instead of the Kanji, we had Rōmaji, uhm, Latinized ..."
She looked at me with a not-quite blank expression.
I paused to organize my thoughts. "The Church prepares missionary materials for us gaijin using Latin script -- Japanese written in ordinary English alphabet. Pronunciation rules are like Spanish, mostly. The script is called Rōmaji in Japanese."
"Ah. So you didn't actually have to study using the Japanese alphabet? You said con-something?"
"Kanji. Japanese ideographs." (In modern twenty-first century terminology, we call them logograms.) "It was actually against the rules to study Kanji when I started."
"Against the rules? That seems a little extreme."
"Some missionaries seemed to get too distracted by them. And there's this idea that they aren't necessary, and are actually preventing Japanese society from progressing, anyway."
"In your church?"
"In general academic circles, as well."
(I kid you not. You have to understand. This was before personal computers became powerful enough to allow everybody to handle the tens of thousands of Japanese Kanji and the hundred-thousand-plus Chinese Han characters -- Xanja or whatever you choose to call them.)
"Seems a little, I don't know, parochial?"
"I think it is. But it isn't just parochial. Even the Japanese Ministry of Education recognizes that tens of thousands of characters is too much of a burden to education for most people."
(The Japanese industrial standards organizations were also involved in constructing the list of daily-use jōyō Kanji, and the several standard Rōmaji systems.)
"Oh. Tens of thousands."
"They've reduced the number required in high school to under two thousand, and that's the official number for newspapers, too. Other than exceptions for a few technical characters sometimes."
"Two thousand?" She was still a bit incredulous.
"Six hundred in elementary school."
"Okay, that sounds hard." She frowned. "So the missionaries have material that, uhm, doesn't use Japanese letters."
"It uses Romaji -- Latin-based writing, pronunciation rules mostly like Spanish, so it's easy to pronounce. Hard to understand, if you're looking for root words and other clues, like I do, but easy to pronounce. Most missionaries find it easier to memorize the sounds."
"So what did you do?"
"I talked the mission president into letting me use the Kanji materials that the Japanese missionaries were using. It worked for me and some other missionaries, so they changed the rules. Now they just recommend not getting too focused on Kanji."
"That makes sense. Do you witness from the Bible?"
"Yeah. Of course. And from the Book of Mormon. Have you heard about it?"
"Professor Reeves has mentioned it a couple of times. Is your family all Mormon?"
"Oh, yeah. For several generations."
"My family's been Baptist since my grandfather joined. We feel pretty comfortable with the Baptists."
I nodded my head, and thought for a moment how God never seemed to allow me to get comfortable anywhere. And the conversation seemed to bump into a wall.
After a bit of struggling for something to say next, I said, "Well, I need to get over to the library and then the school offices. Gotta look at textbooks and arrange for classes this winter."
"Oh." Now she seemed disappointed. But she brightened. "Are you taking classes here next semester?"
"Yeah. It looks like it. I think I plan to get a lot of general ed in and transfer to another school. Or maybe get an associate's in Electronics."
"I'll be transferring to TCU after I finish winter semester and graduate."
"Texas Christian University."
"Yeah."
"Do you do work for my dad often?"
"Several times a week."
"Then we'll probably bump into each other again, I guess."
"I guess so."
"See you around."
"Sure ..."
I ducked my head in the Japanese o-jigi that had become habit, turned to leave, and felt her eyes on my back as I walked through the door.
I thought it was probably my imagination. As a teenager, I often worried that everyone was watching me.
"See you around." Her voice followed me.
(I forget now which school the real Julia transferred to, but Julia in this novel isn't the real Julia, so TCU will do.)
"So what do you think of Julia?"
"You could have warned me. Really, Dad, next time you want to set me up, warn me. I'm not offended, but is she?"
"She saw your picture on my desk, and I told her a little about you. And she seemed interested."
"If I'd known even that much, I'd have been better prepared to make intelligent conversation."
"You won't hold it against her?"
"No. But we sure struggled to find something to talk about. She's a Baptist, Dad."
"You're not prejudiced." This was both an assertion and a command.
"I guess we can share about Jesus. We can share scriptures from the Bible. How am I going to talk with her about Abinidi or Mosiah in the Book of Mormon? Or about the temple? I'm not as shy as I used to be, but I need more common ground."
"How are you going to know if you don't give it a try? Give her a chance, man."
"When? It's not like we're going to have reasons to spend time together."
"A book about the 8080 and the 6800."
"¿Los números?" Dad raised his eyebrows.
"Microprocessors," I shook my head and laughed in reply.
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