When Bad Proms Happen to Good People
CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith
from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…
The Question of Theodicy: Why does God allow evil, like
tornadoes and wars and high school proms?
I
think it was Mike who first told me that I was taking Judith to the prom at a
place I’ll call Fort McCracken, 17 miles from our town. I had never heard of
her.
Judith
was the only child in a wealthy family. Her father was a judge. Her parents had
given her a new Chrysler convertible at the start of her junior year. That
guaranteed that no Fort McCracken boy would date her, since no Fort McCracken
boy had a car that could compete. So when prom time came that year, she was
dateless.
Her
mother was a friend of Ann’s mother. Ann was in my high school class. Judith’s
mother told Ann’s mother of the problem. Ann’s mother asked what Judith was
interested in.
“Journalism.
She’s editor of the school newspaper.”
“Have
I got a deal for you,” said Ann’s mother. “My daughter is in class with the
editor of our school newspaper. He’s a nice boy.”
That’s
the curse mothers always put on me: He’s a nice boy.
So
Ann’s mother and Judith’s mother decided I would take Judith to the prom. The
irony is that I was further out of my league than any boy in Fort McCracken.
I
had no car and no suit, so the mothers arranged for my friend Mike, who was
dating Ann, to get invitations to their prom, too, and my sister, who had
graduated and was working fulltime, bought me a suit, and a pink and gray tie,
which I still have. [You don’t outgrow ties.] Ann’s mother, of course, knew all
about Judith’s dress, so she bought a corsage that would coordinate with it.
Mike
and Ann drove down the gravel roads to our farm and I rode to Fort McCracken in
the back seat of Mike’s two-door hardtop Pontiac, with Judith’s corsage in the
front seat beside Ann. When we arrived at Judith’s house, it was almost dark.
Ann scrunched up toward the dashboard and I pushed the seat forward to get out,
thus crushing the corsage.
It
was a big house, fronted by a high porch with a dim light. I carried the
crushed corsage up the long walk and climbed the creaking steps to the shadowed
front door. I knocked. The door opened. A classy blond girl in a formal stood
there. I spoke one of the best opening lines in the annals of blind prom dates:
“It looks like I’ve come to the right place.”
I
pushed the crushed corsage at her. She looked at it and was speechless. An
older blond appeared over her shoulder, took the corsage away to the kitchen,
where she performed voodoo on it. Judith and I stood there and tried not to
look at each other. “That’s my father,” she said, indicating a man sitting in a
dark corner of the living room, peeling an apple, with a butcher knife, one
long peel sliding off the apple with surgical precision. He didn’t say
anything.
Judith’s
mother returned with the corsage, and taking no chances that her daughter might
get crushed, too, pinned it on Judith herself. She handed Judith a boutonniere.
Judith tried to slip it through the button-hole of my new lapel. It wouldn’t
go. The mother tried. “It’s not cut,” she said. [What farm boy knows you have
to slit the buttonhole in a new suit yourself?]
“I’ll
take care of him,” her father said, jumping up and advancing on me with the
butcher knife. He grabbed my lapel and began to saw at it, the knife an inch from
my throat. As a judge he must have used the Solomonic solution, because he was
really good with that thing. The slit was perfect, and Judith slipped the
flower into it.
I
don’t remember much from that point. I assumed my job was to make the Fort McCracken
boys jealous, since Judith had gotten such a much better date from out of town,
so I acted mysterious, which meant I spent the evening doing what Helen calls
my “tall silent thing” while Mike and Ann danced. The only thing I remember for
sure was that I mispronounced the word “intricate,” while explaining my reasons
for eschewing all dances but the “bunny hop.”
It’s
important when looking back on such experiences to find the good in an
otherwise disastrous event. I have done so. I’m sure Judith won the contest
among the sisters for who had the best reason to become a nun.
JRMcF
Every
bit of the above is true, except for the name of Fort McCracken. I named it in
honor of the IU basketball coach in my days there, Branch McCracken, who
coached the first two of IU’s 5 NCAA championship teams. Also I’m just making a
reasonable guess about Judith’s career choice.
The
“place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!
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