Love in the Twilight Zone

Part II

J#1, the Matchmaker

The end of the semester was approaching and still no sightings of J#2. I had an in-class final to study for the last week of regular classes, and not very adept at pulling all-nighters, I got up at 4 am to study. I went down to one of the dorm basement study areas and found it already occupied by a rather crabby J#1. He, unlike me, was too familiar with all-nighters. He had been up all night studying and took the arrival of my friendly presence as a signal to start complaining. He was starving, had no money, and his car was buried in snow so that even if he did have money, he didn't want to take the time to clean off his car and drive out to Nick's Diner to get some breakfast so he'd have the energy to finish studying for one of his chemistry exams. I told him I had money and had dug my car out the day before. I offered to drive him to Nick's and buy him breakfast. His eyes lit up, and we were at Nick's Diner on the edge of town before the sun came up.

At the diner, I told J#1 to order whatever he wanted, I was rich that week. He ordered one of the big breakfast platters and when it arrived looked at it, and me, appreciatively. As he was about to take his first bite, I said to J#1, “So, if one wanted to run into J#2, let's say casually, and hang out with him, where would one find him?” J#1 looked at his plate, then looked at me. He asked if the breakfast was a bribe. I nodded. He smiled and between bites of his pancakes, went on to tell me how perfect he thought J#2 and I were for each other. He had known us both since freshman year and he thought highly of us both and J#2 was such a great guy and... J#1 started sounding like M, extolling the virtues of J#2. The problem with J#2, though, was this: He was a really serious student, the smartest of their class of chemistry majors. He spent long hours studying, staying in the library until it closed each night (which explained why I didn't run into him). But J#1 said he knew for a fact that each night, after he came back to the dorm, J#2 went down to the rec room to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone to unwind. J#1 told me that if I went down to the rec room at 11 pm, J#2 would probably be down there in front of the television set.

The next night I went down to the rec room at 11 pm, and there was J#2, watching The Twilight Zone. He smiled at me, and I went over and sat next to him. We watched the episode, then talked. We did the same the next night, and the next, and the next. Some nights we'd go for a walk, some nights drink tea together. During one of these early mini-dates, I heard that still, small voice in my head that I usually identify as too wise to be my own thoughts say, “This is the man you are going to marry.” I filed the voice away in my mind, noting that I hadn't heard that on a date with anyone else before. That week J#2 asked me out to a chemistry professor's Christmas party. Finals came, and then Christmas break. When we returned to campus in January, J#2 and I met in the rec room each night, continuing our pattern of watching The Twilight Zone reruns for much of the semester.

Sometime during the summer after our senior year, after months of dating, J#2 and I were reminiscing about the dorm mixer where we met, laughing about M's desire to match me up with someone so I would stay away from her beloved J#1. J#2 told me that shortly after the mixer, before finals, J#1 approached him and asked him if he liked the girl M had tried to pair him up with at the mixer. J#2 said, yes, he had liked her, liked her a lot. J#1 went on to say that if J#2 was interested in, say, casually running into that girl, he knew for a fact that she went down to the rec room every night at 11 pm and watched reruns of The Twilight Zone...

***

The voice in my head proved to be prophetic. I married J#2 two years later. We've been married 38 years this month. (M did marry the devious J#1, and they have been married almost as long. And Nick's Diner still exists, remarkably unchanged...)

It's been almost 40 years to the day that it was revealed the creative deception of a mutual friend was apparently responsible for bringing me and J#2 together. Yet, I can never bring myself to say our relationship began in a lie. I prefer to think it was forged in the mysterious realm where many long loving relationships begin, a place that often defies simple explanation, a place known as the twilight zone...

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets

the eye is as it appears. -Rod Serling

 

Love in the Twilight Zone

Part I

M, the Matchmaker

This is a story of bribery, deception, and jealousy. It contains assorted chemistry majors, varying degrees of alcohol consumption, a crack-of-dawn breakfast at a greasy spoon diner, and reruns of an iconic 1960s TV show. It is also the story of the beginning of a life-long love. And it is all absolutely true. Only the names have been disguised to protect the identity of the devious, the jealous, and the imbibers. The greasy spoon diner, however, will be identified by its real name – Nick's...

Near the end of my first semester senior year in college, I wandered into the basement rec room of the dorm I was living in to meet some friends at a mixer. It was the early 1970s. The legal drinking age was still eighteen, so dorm mixers usually consisted of a keg of beer, maybe some spiked punch, a sound system playing what would now be considered truly classic rock, and lots of people - some talking, some dancing, all drinking. I had arrived late, and my friends had gotten a head-start on the drinking part. M was there with her boyfriend, J#1. I had known J#1, a chemistry major, since my first day of college. He had attended high school with my first roommate, and we remained good friends even after my roommate transferred to another school. I had known M since my sophomore year, long before she started dating J#1. M was friendly and outgoing but was also one of those rare people who lacked the censor most of us have between our thoughts and our tongues. Cold sober, she would tell you exactly what was on her mind, ask the most straight-forward questions. That night, the plastic cup in her hand had visited the keg more than once before I had arrived and likely contributed to M's confession to me that she would never feel her relationship with J#1 would be secure until I was married off. J#1 and I laughed, as did the other friends who knew of M's insecurities and my long friendship with J#1. M then proceeded to take me around the room and introduce me to anyone she perceived as an eligible guy, listing their attributes in front of them - “He's pre-med. He'll make a fortune someday. He's a great catch. And so cute...” All the guys we approached knew M, so this bizarre search for my future husband was more amusing than embarrassing. Still, it quickly got tiresome, and as she was extolling the virtues of J#2, a chemistry major who lived on the same corridor as J#1, I told her I'd take him. J#2 was friendly in a quiet way, very smart (according to M), funny, and a good conversationalist. We talked until the arrival of that mixer tipping point when more people are on the dance floor than are not. J#2 asked me to dance. (I would later find out that this was an aberration. J#2 was not a dancer. The keg again?) We danced and talked the rest of the night, and J#2 walked me back to my room and said goodnight.

Though we lived on opposite ends of the same co-ed dorm, I didn't see J#2 again that week. I was disappointed. I kind of liked him. Though I didn't previously know him, I recognized J#2 as someone I had seen during the past four years going in and out of the physical science building where I did most of my studying. (I wasn't a science major. I just don't study well in libraries – “Oh, look! Books! Magazines!” – and the physical science building was the most austere, distraction-free place to study on campus.) First semester finals were coming up soon, then Christmas break. I thought it would be nice to run into J#2 before finals week, but it just wasn't happening... 

To be continued...

Tomorrow:

Part II

J#1, the Matchmaker

Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself. - Rod Serling

 

Spiritual Reminders from Han Solo

At our church's Easter service this year, the pastor, using the movie franchise Star Wars as an example of an iconic story imbedded in our culture, asked three questions regarding the congregation's awareness and attitudes toward the well-known saga. The first question was how many people present had seen at least part of any of the six Star Wars movies. Everyone raised their hands. The second question - how many people felt they learned something by watching the movies – had about a third of those present with hands in the air. The last question – did anyone believe that the Star Wars saga did, in fact, actually happen – was acknowledged by no one, though I suspected my husband, who considers the original Star Wars film to be the greatest movie ever made, might be a little fuzzy in that area. He was sitting next to me, so I pinned both his hands down...just in case.

My husband and I saw Star Wars when it was first released in an old movie theater in upstate New York. We had been married one month. We sat in the balcony, and a hidden projector made clouds continually move across the domed ceiling of the theater, giving a surreal feeling to the movie experience. My husband loved the movie. I thought it was O.K., but in the years since, in the many rewatchings of the original movie and, of course, all those sequels and prequels that followed, I, too, have come to have my favorite lines and favorite characters in the Star Wars world.

On Easter morning, I was one of those people who raised my hand when asked if I felt I had learned anything from watching Star Wars. Perhaps “learned” is not quite the right word. “Reminded of something important” would be a better way to describe it. My favorite character, Han Solo, undergoes a conversion experience (of sorts) in the first movie. When Luke Skywalker comments to him that he doesn't appear to believe in the Force, Han responds:

Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

Of course, skeptic Han, traveling with the Star Wars cast of characters through their adventures, by the end of the movie comes to believe in something bigger than himself. Han, now a true believer, imperfectly walks his new “faith” out through the rest of the Star Wars trilogy.

Now, I don't pretend Han Solo is a spiritual giant or even a good Christian metaphor, but there are three Han moments in the Star Wars movies that always catch my attention and encourage me in a healthier faith journey of my own:

1. Han knows when the blame is not his to shoulder. He knows he's not God.

As a first born and innately responsible person, I have a tendency to take on responsibility for many things that really have nothing to do with me. And, forgetting I'm not God, I often blame myself and wonder what I could have done differently to achieve a better outcome. When the Millennium Falcon fails to make the jump to hyperspace (in The Empire Strikes Back), Han amazingly, yet confidently states “It's not my fault!” knowing that he's done everything needed to repair and maintain his ship. The present problem is out of his control. Of course, he takes the responsibility of fixing things again – it is his ship – but he knows everything that doesn't go right is not necessarily his fault. There are forces and people outside of his present moment that influence his world. Han's confident “It's not my fault!” reminds me it's O.K. to not beat myself up over the events in my life I'm unable to control, that I can go forward, trusting God is big enough to shoulder the responsibility of things beyond my purview.

2. Han has the faith to look beyond the statistics. He is not bound by the probable.

When C-3PO points out that the possibility of successfully navigating the asteroid field they have just entered is approximately 3,720 to 1, Han is unfazed. His reply? “Never tell me the odds!” We find ourselves living in a statistically-driven world, a world that tells us, and often limits, what can happen to us, what we can accomplish. “The five-year survival rate of stage two cancer of this type is 60%”, “Only 27% percent of college graduates are able to find work in their field of study”, “Less than 23% of born again Christians embrace Christ after their twenty-first birthday”... When I am faced with numbers not in my favor, my default is to cave in and say, “What's the use? Success here is highly improbable, if not impossible...” But then I hear in my head Han's dismissive voice - “Never tell me the odds!” I remember I worship a God Who operates beyond all odds, whose purposes and plans for me can never be thwarted by the unlikely or the improbable. I can lay aside the numbers and go forward with hope.

3. Han knows how to dream big. He has high expectations.

Luke Skywalker, trying to get Han to commit to carrying out Princess Leia's mission, appeals to Han's need for money. Luke tells him Leia is rich and powerful and his reward would be more wealth than he, Han, could imagine. Han's response? “I don't know...I can imagine quite a bit.” Luke's words are a faint echo of Paul's in Ephesians - “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (3:20) In Han's response, I hear a healthy desire to imagine large, not unlike the healthy spiritual desire C. S. Lewis challenges us to:

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (From The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses)

In Han's response to Luke, I suspect Han is not one “far too easily pleased”. I find his response an encouragement to imagine large what God has in store for me, to be spiritually greedy, in a good way. I, like Han, am free to “imagine quite a bit”, knowing the most I can imagine still pales in comparison to the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to me in Christ Jesus...

One good solid hope is worth a cart-load of certainties. - Doctor Who (Tom Baker) Warrior's Gate