Chapter 1.0 -- Homecoming Dance -- Midland Airfield
My flight to Japan from the Missionary Training Center had gone through Seattle to the old Tokyo Haneda Airport. The flight back home had started at Narita Airport and connected at San Francisco and Dallas before coming back to end at Midland Air Field. MAF was an international airport because of the oil industry, but I had already gone through customs at San Francisco, where I and my three companions had said goodbye and gone our separate ways.
They rebuilt MAF around 1999, but partially kept the flavor of the main building.
Midland International Airport Terminal Aug 2013
Copyright Wikimedia User Blueag9
Used unmodified, by license CC BY-SA 3.0.
Mom waved when she saw me coming out of the passenger cabin door, and I waved back. Boarding tunnel bridges were a new thing and weren't in use at MAF yet, they would just roll boarding stairs up to the plane. Mom waited a little ways away from the small crowd at the foot of the stairs, and, when my feet hit the tarmac, she held up keys.
I grinned and made my through the crowd to where she waited.
"Dad's teaching in Pecos. He has the Colt, so you get to drive the truck. You do want to drive, don't you?"
"The truck, huh? Yep, I can do that."
"Oh, give me a hug. You aren't too big to kiss your Ma now, are you?"
In spite of all the uncertainties, it was good to be back home in west Texas after all.
At the luggage carousel, I pulled off my suitcase.
"Just one?"
"The smaller one is inside the big one. Now we're waiting for my tea box." Those big wooden tea boxes lined with sheet metal are not nearly as cheap and available now as they were then. Back then they could be shipped within Japan by Yamato or Sagawa for fairly cheap. They made sense for transfers. They don't any more. Things have changed.
"Tea box?"
The tea box came up the chute.
"That?" she asked as it came into sight.
"Yep. Sherise felt inspired to send me just enough money to ship the souvenirs home in it, packed in the rest of my clothes."
"It's big. The truck is in the parking lot. I could watch your luggage while you try to find it, or we could splurge and borrow a cart."
"What section did you park in?"
"Get a cart." Moms didn't roll her eyes, now, did she?
The tea box and the suitcase fit under the camper shell on the bed of the F-100 with lots of room to spare. With the luggage loaded and the cart returned, I walked around the truck, checking the vehicle and the parking lot, then got behind the wheel. It had been two years, but it felt just as natural as if it had been only a day.
"You fixed most of the dents," I observed.
We considered ourselves conscientious about others' property. Family property, maybe not so much. Both the truck and the Colt station wagon had dings and dents from getting them in and out of the spacious parking in front of our house, and also from the doors being blown too far open in sudden west Texas gusts. Too much space, and I guess we forgot to be careful when it was just our cars and we were running late or it was really windy.
We really were careful about other cars, though, especially when we had large groups over for meetings and such. Just not our own.
"Dad's students." Many of the students in Dad's Spanish classes were taking vocational education courses, and, like most of the professors there, Dad would sometimes let them work on our cars and appliances for projects in their coursework.
I took extra care getting out of the parking lot, running through the H shift pattern with the shifter on the steering column twice before I put it into reverse, checked the mirrors, and eased off the clutch pedal, watching over my shoulder through the back window and in the mirrors as I backed the truck out of the parking space into the access lane.
It is one of the ironies of interface, that standard automobile driver jargon speaks of the clutch in opposition to the clutch's actual function.
You know, pushing the pedal down actually releases the clutch mechanism so you can shift, and letting the pedal up engages it so you can move the car. So clutching in a car means to engage the clutch release mechanism, releasing the actual clutch. And easing off the clutch pedal engages the clutch by releasing the clutch release mechanism.
When you clutch your wallet, you hold it tight.
But when you clutch in the car, the clutch mechanism lets go, so you can start the engine, shift gears, etc. In the idiom for manual transmissions, the meaning of the word is inverted.
I often think about things like that, and I may have been thinking about it then.
"There's a new highway," Mom broke into my thoughts. "Do you want to take it?"
"Sure." I clutched and braked, shifted to first when the truck stopped, and headed forward for the airport exit.
"Turn right as you leave the airport instead of left."
I followed the signs from the airport and put the truck on the new local highway to Odessa. Of course I didn't recognize the road, but I recognized the general featureless expanse of west Texas and I knew which direction I was headed by the reds on the twilit horizon where the sun had set. No getting lost on this new highway.
"Thanksgiving dance tonight at church. Are you up to it?"
"Oh? Mission president said it would be okay, so, yeah."
In the past, missionaries would wait to be interviewed by their home stake presidents before they would consider themselves released from the more strict rules of social conduct that full-time missionaries obliged themselves to follow.
My mission president, in my final interview, gave me to understand that I would never be released from being a missionary, in other words, from my obligation to continue preaching the gospel. But he also told me that my new assignment required social interaction of various sorts, and most of the special restrictions for full-time missionaries no longer applied once the big transfer was over and I was in the care of my family.
He
was specific about it. Taking a detour for a date on the flight home
would be discouraged, but once my family picked me up at the airport,
anything I would normally do as a member of my family and a member of the Church would be okay.
"Wouldn't miss it."
Of course I would meet with the stake president, President Price, within a week or two, and after that with the stake high council to give my final official report of my full-time mission. But I would not need to feel restricted until those meetings by anything but my conscience about things like dances, and even dates, if the leaders could not fit me into their schedules soon enough.
I understand the policy of the Church on things like this changes from time to time, or it may be that specific instructions for specific cases are sometimes given, and later mistaken for policy. Or both.
Letter-of-the-law is for other religions, or, should be, anyway.
Sunset in west Texas lasts a while. We were home before the last pinks left the sky.
Mom watched, bemused, as I carried the tea box and then the suitcase into my room. I left my stuff on the floor and headed for the shower.
"There's a student Dad wanted you to invite, but she said she was busy."
"Huh?"
Mom didn't explain, and I immediately forgot while I cleaned up and dug dancing clothes out of my closet.
Yeah. My closet. When Denny was still home, at his suggestion, we'd knocked the closet wall out. So it was an open closet, with just the support beams separating it from the rest of the room. And we'd carpeted the whole floor in sapphire blue. Loft beds and a chalkboard covering one wall. Great room for a single geek.
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