Of First Loves, True Love, and Fatherly Love

Yesterday marked nine years since my Junior Prom. Probably seems weird to you that I remember the date of my Junior Prom, but you've got to understand...that date was locked into my brain and looked forward to for a full six months before it actually happened. I was ridiculous then, I'm still ridiculous now.  And I'm sure this post will be a confession of things I thought were totally secret but in reality, since I'm kind of a transparent person, everybody around me knew.

My first love was a farmboy from Cove, UT. He might now not even know that I consider him that I but I do. And we'd decided way back in October of our junior year that since he had a policy of only taking girls out on a date once in high school (a policy I don't think he quite managed to keep), I claimed Junior Prom as my night.

I was convinced it was the evening all my adolescent dreams were going to come true.

I remember getting ready, having my hair done in a salon, pulling on those white satin gloves (a surefire way to get a boy to hold your hand), wearing so much pink it should be illegal, and coming around the corner. My cousin, who was up visiting for the weekend, told me later that he said "wow" and was otherwise speechless. I don't remember his reaction.

But I do remember my father's. He took a quick look at me and then pretended not to notice how gussied up I was. I didn't know then, but I know now--he knew. He always knew when my heart was at its most vulnerable, he could always tell the boys I liked, and he had some sort of sixth sense about how things were going to work out.

So he ignored me and went back to my date. "You're going to let my daughter get into that filthy car?"

"The inside is clean. I promise."

"Daaaad," I begged. After a few token pictures by the fireplace, we were off. And after a few hours of dinner, dancing, and a drive around the Temple, we were back, and I was still as just unkissed as before and he was still just as not-in-love with me and in-love-with-one-of-my-best-friends as ever. I seemed to know then that our one beautiful date would be the end of that.

And so it was.

The young man that I had fallen for had changed and things just weren't the same any more. I mourned the friend I had lost, the person he had stopped being, the closeness of being fifteen without the pressure of dating.

"Rinda," my mom stopped me one day a few weeks later, "you will always have a place in your heart for your first love. But you were meant for more."

And I believed her, because I had heard stories of her first love, and continued to hear them every time we went up to Montana. Scott and I refer to him as The Good Kisser because that's what she says about him as she gets a faraway, blushing look on her face. Every. Time.

And though I always waited for that apology letter--the one that said "I'm sorry I was an idiot and I hurt your feelings," the one that my friends who had been in similar situations had all gotten, the one that my husband, having been the heart-breaker himself, wrote to his high school girlfriend, the one that seemed to exist for everybody but me--it never came.

Fast forward from Junior Prom a few months. It is my seventeenth birthday. My friend Scott is up visiting his grandparents and wants to come see me. So I invite him to dinner with my family. My mom takes one look at this boy from Sandy, Utah--his height and build and blue eyes--and falls in love for me. "He reminds me so much of your dad. Are you sure there is nothing there?" She will say, over and over and over again over the next five years.

My father doesn't say a word all night.

Scott is quiet also, but talks when we are alone. He eats my requested dinner of Oriental Chicken Salad even though he hates lettuce. He takes me to a movie but we talk the entire time. We laugh together. And when he leaves to return to his grandparent's house, I believe that there are such things as good young men again.

Five years later, I am unexpectedly sitting in a red chair in my mission president's makeshift office, my heart broken, more so than my body. They are sending me home. I am sick so I am going home. I finally love being a missionary but I am working too hard so I am being sent home. President Thurston tells me he and my dad decided this together, and I trust that if my dad helped make this decision that I had no choice in, it really is the best thing for me.

I think our interview is just about over when President throws a curveball at me. "Your father says there is a young man at home that you are quite close with who just got off his mission."

I nod my head. Scott has only been home three weeks, and though I am dying to see him, I am way too afraid to bring him up. President had already given me the "Absolutely NO Dating While You are Home" portion of my going-home talk.

"I don't see why you can't see him. Invite him to dinner with your family a few times. But don't go over to his house."

"Okay, " I say, seeing the first glimmer of hope in all this diabetic madness. What I don't know then, and what I still don't know totally for sure now, is that my mission president must have made this possible on very strict conditions for my father: Don't leave them alone. Don't let her go to his house. Make sure she comes back on her mission.

I am thinking my mother probably didn't know about these conditions.

So, two weeks later, Scott makes the drive up and joins my family for dinner. He shows up in a suit. He's just been to the Temple, trying to decide what to do with his life now that his mission is over. His white truck (which prompted no end of teasing from my mother about my knight-in-shining-armor turning up in a white truck which was almost like a white horse) is surprisingly clean after a drive through Sardine Canyon. He eats dinner and laughs with my family. We talk about our missions and how much we miss them. We talk about our families. We talk about the gospel, about school, about his work.

We talk about everything but us.

But that is the way it has always been.

The next day I accompany my mom to the grocery store. To get me out of the house, you know. To show people I didn't come home for shameful reasons. We see a few people. One of my best friend's mothers gives me a hug and tells me I don't need to go back. "Think of your future husband, your children" she says, and I wonder what kind of logic she is using, because those are the very reasons why I am dead set on going back.

And there we are, right next to the check out line, when I see him. That boy from high school. With his cute new little wife of all of three months.

And he says to me, "Hey Rinda! How was Texas?"

And I realize he has no clue that it has only been eight months instead of eighteen, that me being home is not so happy of news. "Good," I say. "I love it."

And that is the end of that.

As we get back into the car, I turn to my mom and say, "He's kind of shrimpy, isn't he?"

"Yes," She smiles. "Definitely not six foot four."

"And his eyes aren't so blue."

"No, they are not."

"So it is probably a good thing it didn't work out," I realize.

"Yes," she says, understanding. "A very good thing."

Two months later, it is the Fourth of July, and my mom has somehow convinced my father that it is okay for Scott and I to be alone for a few minutes. "They need to figure out their future," she says. She is convinced we are getting married. She has already started planning the reception and been informed that even though he went to France, I hate eclairs and we will not be serving them at my wedding.

When Scott has finally driven away for the evening, I walk back in and tell my mom what just happened. After seeing the look on her face, I know this news will take some getting used to. She didn't see it coming. So I make her tell my dad. And later that night, she tells my father that we kissed under the moonlight. "Is that even appropriate?" He asks. And it isn't until she is telling me about this conversation that I realize my father was given strict instructions never to let us out of his sight...but he did, and now look what happened. Oh dear. He must have been so worried.

He didn't need to be.

I found a good one.

Five days after that magical kiss, I am back in my mission president's office in Colleyville, Texas. I am so happy to be wearing a nametag again I am almost giddy. Until President says, "Is there anything that happened at home while you were gone that you need to tell me about?" and I confess I was kissed. I am just sure they are going to put me back on a plane. I'm not even worthy to be sitting there.

President is silent for several minutes. This is probably the first time he's ever encountered this situation. Finally, he laughs. "Sister Burningham," he said sternly, "no more kissing boys on your mission!"

"Okay," I promise. And for the next eleven months, occasionally when I see President, he will give me a little wink and tease me about that boy at home,my best-friend-not-my-boyfriend. And as I am sitting in the back of his car, sandwiched in between the two sisters going home with me as Sister Thurston tells us about a former sister missionary who got engaged within a day of going home, President makes eye contact with me in the rearview mirror and says, "Now Sisters, kissing at the airport isn't appropriate!"

The other sisters assure him he has nothing to worry about. They don't know about my transgression. I was sworn to secrecy. He isn't worried about them. He is still looking at me. I laugh, "he isn't even going to be at the airport, President!"

But President Thurston's worries are nothing compared to my father's when I get home and things get moving much faster than anticipated. Scott's already asked for my hand when Dad pulls me aside and tells me that February is a good time for a wedding. It's July. We're done with waiting. And a week or two later, when we show up at my father's work and I have a sparkly diamond on my left ring finger, I realize I have never seen the color drain out of my father's face so quickly.

It's his fault and he knows it.

And on the way to the Temple that next September, he tells me that it isn't too late to change my mind. I just laugh and say "I really do want to marry him, Daddy!" But he still locks me in when we pull up at the Temple, and my mom has to tell him to unlock the door so I can get out and get married. We joke about it later.

And  for the first year and a half of our marriage, that boy from high school drives the bus that takes my husband to work.

I find it funny and ironic.

And sometimes I wish I could remind that boy of that conversation we had way back in high school at the age of 16, just a month after I'd met my true love but didn't know it yet, when that boy still drove me around everywhere we went, when we were on that little backroad between Richmond and Cove and I expressed my desire to serve a mission but my worry that I would never get married if I did.

"Well," he said, with that twinkle in his eye that made my teenage heart just soar,"I guess you'll just have to find someone who will wait for you."

And I want to say, I found him.

And he waited.

 

my three favorite blue-eyed men from Sandy, UT: Scott, my Dad, and President Thurston