onerous mission

by chasm8empty8void

One lack that caused me extreme misery during freshman year was an inability to schedule and keep appointments. The first major incident related to this lack occurred at Thanksgiving. My grandmother knew a family who lived in the city where I was in college. She arranged for me to have Thanksgiving dinner with them.

I was enamored of dorm food, and I felt very comfortable sitting around a table of my peers having a third slice of apple pie or fingering a bowl of jello. On Thanksgiving I was enjoying a plate of turkey when a twenty year old girl dressed in a formal coat and carrying a purse appeared at my table. She turned out to be a daughter of the inviting family. She had been sent on the onerous mission of collecting the cad who had forgotten that he was supposed to be sitting at her table at that moment. She looked extremely annoyed.

I entered a state of catatonic shock. I mumbled that I was not going to come. I had forgot, and I had better just stay where I was. I felt like my guts were going to turn to sand. Her family was actually giving me the option of redeeming myself—or they felt obliged to honor my grandmother’s request.

My hair was growing out. I was turning into a hippie. The kind of hippie who was dropping out because he couldn’t fix himself, that is.

I would have liked to substitute some other boy for myself. He would have been a forgetful type, with a great deal of aplomb. By the time he and the daughter arrived at her house, they would both have been laughing about their families. He would redeem himself at dinner with tales of his grandmother and what it was like to be a freshman during these confusing times. He and the daughter would have dated, and she would have invited him to the family house in the south of France the next summer. Her family would have been concerned about the age difference. This paragraph has taken a predictable turn.

A couple of days later, I had a second Thanksgiving meal, this time with some leftist students I had recently met who went to a different university than I did. We all came close to getting killed at that dinner, but nobody noticed my lack of appointment-keeping skills.