On Second Thought


Chapter One

I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. —Lily Tomlin

I am not the type of guy that is often stranded in the desert. I'm not sure if there is a type of guy who is often stranded in the desert but, if there is, I pity him.

I'm not from the desert. Well, I guess that's not entirely true. I'm from Salt Lake City, which I constantly hear is a desert, although all the trees and water would have fooled me. I ended up in this desert, however, due to my extremely specialized field of expertise.

The direction of my education was primarily a product of my mission. I went to Washington D.C. and, though I never baptized a Senator, I caught the political bug. On returning home, I quickly enrolled at the University of Utah in Political Science, with an emphasis in Public Administration. I wanted to be part of the action. I wanted to be the guy in the movies that sits in the oval office and tells the president "The people won't like it" and "This is political suicide." I thought I might even be the guy that stands on the steps of some landmark and tells some corrupt politician that he's going to have to find someone else to do his dirty work. The flag would be waving in the breeze behind me.

My mom cried. She had dreams of me becoming a doctor. She also had very open dreams of me going to BYU, getting married to the first girl I saw and immediately producing grandbabies.

My dad said nothing about it. He figured that, like most things I had gotten myself into, the thrill would wear off. Of course, he was right. Somewhere between my class on the economics of the Pacific Rim and my seminar on Middle Eastern political thought, I realized it wasn't for me. Unfortunately, I was too sick and tired of school to change my major.

So I finished school and got a job in Public Administration. Actually, I got a job with the Transportation Division filling out forms whenever an intersection needed a new stop sign. It wasn't a bad job, assuming you have dreamed all your life about doing paperwork and have a passion for traffic signals. Unfortunately, I had neither.

I also learned that, much to my surprise, the average public administrator never goes to the oval office to advise the president about anything, and no corrupt politicians ask the stop sign guy to do their dirty work.

In addition to my employment rut, I had a far worse problem. I was nearing the ripe old age of 25 and was still unmarried – an offense that can bring about disciplinary action in some student wards. The U had offered few possibilities, since most of the girls in my classes were the type of people I mentioned before – those with a passion for traffic signals. I dated one girl for about a semester, until I could no longer stand our weekly outing to the state legislature.

At the Transportation Division, my choices were slim. There was a thirty eight year old secretary who still lived at home with her parents, and the seventeen-year-old courier who took away my completed stop sign forms and dropped a fresh batch on my desk.

So I decided to go back to school. Of course, since my ultimate goal was to seek after anything virtuous, lovely and of good report, I had no choice but to attend BYU. My Mom threw a party. My Dad once again said nothing but, I imagine, thought about how his fool son wasn't going to amount to anything.

The bishop of my singles ward didn't take the news well. I tried to soften the blow by reminding him over and over that it was my intent to be married for time and all eternity. It didn't work of course. He pulled out his copy of the ward directory, bound in leather and embossed with gold, containing photographs of every member of the ward. He made me go down the list and explain why each and every girl was unsuitable wife material. Eventually he made some comment about Steve Young, grudgingly wished me well and showed me to the door.

At BYU, I decided that I would avoid any classes that sounded interesting and, instead, go after a profitable career. All my friends told me it was a bad idea, but all of them were making barely more than minimum wage filling out forms.

As long as I was going back to school, I might as well go the whole way. I went pre-med. I had fairly good study habits and worked my way quickly through a biology degree. Along the way my academic advisor pointed out that getting a minor always looks good when applying to graduate school, so I leafed through the class schedules until I decided on horticulture. Not only was it biology related, but also sounded like it would have a lot of girls in it.

I began dating a horticulture major named Mandy. It only took two months of studying together and a late night walk to the Provo temple to get engaged. She liked plants, I liked her and my Mom loved the whole concept. We decided that we would get married after I graduated and before I started medical school.

Everything was great. I was getting married to a great girl, I was going to be making large sums of money and, who knows, maybe I'd be the Surgeon General one day and get to advise the President about something.

The time finally came and I graduated. My Mom looked so proud, much prouder than when I had graduated from the U, and my Dad seemed pleasantly surprised that I had made it through school a second time. My younger brother and sister grumbled about having to go watch me graduate again, knowing that they'd have to do it again four years later.

It was only a week later, one deceptively sunny day in early May, when my life, which appeared momentarily to be on track, came crashing down.

I was lying around my apartment watching TV, happy in the knowledge that I wasn't in class, when the doorbell rang. It was Mandy. I asked her why she rang the doorbell and she opened her mouth to say something, but sat down instead. I returned to my seat, engrossed in a rerun of 'Chips.'

"I'm going to become a child psychologist," she blurted out.

"But you're a junior," I answered absent-mindedly as Eric Estrada jumped his motorcycle off a convenient mound of dirt. "I thought only freshmen wanted to be child psychologists."

Of course that was the wrong thing to say.

"I don't think you understand,” she sneered. “I want to finish my degree here."

We had, of course, discussed this all before. My applications to medical school were in and things were looking good.

"What about med school?"

She sighed and leaned back into my beat up couch, which almost sucked her in. "I don't know." There was a lot more anxiety in her voice than I would have expected for a discussion about majors.

"I could end up going to the U, then we could--" She cut me off with a look of more anger and frustration than I had ever seen in her. And that was saying a lot.

"You don't understand." She was looking directly at me and a chill went down my spine. To this point in the conversation I had had no idea what she was talking about. We had talked often about med school and she agreed that she would finish up her bachelor's degree wherever I ended up going. It didn't seem to me like it should be a problem at all. If you could imagine a person with less direction than I had, it would be Mandy. In her two and a half years at BYU she had gone through exactly eleven majors - everything from accounting to youth management.

"I've been talking to Ben," she continued slowly. Ben was my roommate.

"He told you about my snoring problem, didn't he." I was trying to lighten what was quickly becoming a dark mood, but her face had turned from rosy to crimson.

"No, Walt. We've been talking - Ben and I. He says that he's been praying a lot and thinks that, well, you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"He's received inspiration that we should get married."

I wasn't expecting that at all. Ben, of all people. He'd always been kind of quiet and never did much dating, and all of a sudden he's telling my fiancé that it has been revealed to him from on high that they are meant for each other. Maybe the two of them were just much more in tune than I was, but I never received that particular burning of the bosom.

She waited for me to respond. From the back of the apartment, I heard Ben opening the window and escaping into the parking lot.

I had nothing to say. Well, I had quite a bit to say, but none of it was ever said. I stared at her in utter confusion until she could no longer stand it and left. I thought for a moment I would run after her, but the phone rang.