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Show 144 activities generated by the young people themselve, the hayrack rides, the sings up the canyon, the picnics, the weekly dances, even the long established water-melon stealing. Above all, I had enjoyed the attention of the boys. I was not a social failure. I decided that when I went home I would either go with boys and girls of my choice or I would have no friends at all. Even though I was only fifteen, going on sixteen, it still looms as one of the more important decisions of my life. An anticlimax almost wrecked it at the last minute. One of the boys had walked me home from Sunday evening church service and we talked on the porch. "Mabel says you are not popular in your home town, " he said. The mantle of the Wallflower fell over my spirit and I felt like an imposter. It was such a shock to my psyche that I actually swayed against the pillar and hugged it to keep from falling. I felt Mabel had betrayed me. "I'm not, " I admitted miserably, and could hardly wait to get to the bedroom to weep, but I must have passed his inspection because he wrote letters to me after I left and dated me when I was in training and he was going on his mission from Salt Lake City. He is still my friend. This experience gave me insight to the miseries of adolescents; I came to look on it as a valuable preserver against early marriage such as my friends fell into by their popularity, and as an adult, as President of the M. I. A. I was able to talk straight from the shoulder (and from the pulpit) to the young people, explain their psychology to them, so that we |
