Great Lovers I have
Known—James “Cecil” Simons
After Cecil
broke up with Jan, or more accurately, after Jan ran away with someone else,
life went on in a rather normal fashion.
At the end of the year, we both graduated. I moved to Salt
Lake Salt
Lake
Cecil’s
first real girlfriend was a beautiful Danish immigrant and convert named Mona
Gadd. Mona was one of the spunkiest
girls I have ever known. Before she
dated Cecil she went out with a fellow in our ward named Jim (I don’t remember
his last name). Jim was—or at least, he
claimed to be—a reformed, i.e. ex-drug addict.
I was Jim’s home teacher, and I must confess to being a bit skeptical
about the “reformed” in his title. For
one thing, he had the most volatile temper of anyone I have ever known well. Whenever I was with him, I felt that I had to
weigh ever word I said, because it didn’t take much to set him off. He was also a determined, almost violent,
misogynist. Whenever girl spoke in
Church, he would stand up and storm out of the chapel, slamming the door as he
left. Normally, he would come back in as
soon as the girl had finished speaking only to repeat the performance as soon
as another girl began speaking. Since
our congregation consisted of about 3 times as many girls as guys, most of our
speakers in Church were girls, so Jim spent a good deal of time storming out of
the meetings.
Jim was
nearly always out of work because as soon as an employer would ask him to do
something he didn’t want to do, or if they would ask him to do something that
he felt could, and should, be done in a different way, he would simply explode
in anger. Since this almost always
occurred in the first day or two of a new job, he spent more time looking for
work than working. He was always
complaining to me in my home teaching visits, that he felt that Utah
employers didn’t sufficiently value men who didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs,
which, as far as I could tell, were about his only qualifications for any job,
and, as I mentioned, I was personally a little skeptical about those. One time, just before Mother’s Day, I was
driving several people I home taught to some kind of a ward activity. I mentioned that I was wondering what to get
my mother for Mother’s day. The other
people in the car either made suggestions or told what they were going to get
their mothers. When it was Jim’s turn,
he simply muttered vehemently, “I wouldn’t get my mother anything. I hate my mother. I hate her even more than I hate my
father.” Needless to say, there was a
very embarrassing pause, since none of the rest of us knew how to respond to
that comment.
Well
anyway, Jim asked Mona Gadd out on a date.
After either one or two dates, (I rather think it was on the first date)
Jim asked Mona to marry him. If it had
been me, knowing Jim’s temper, I would
have said, “Sure, anything you want. You bet, I’m all for it—the sooner the
better, just not tonight.” Then when I got home I would have called him up and
said I’d changed my mind and called the police and had a restraining order
issued against him. Mona did none of
those things. She just laughed. “Get serious”, she said. “You don’t know me well enough to marry me.”
As Jim
later explained to me, he had been serious and he was plenty mad, but, he said,
since he really liked Mona, he had restrained himself and didn’t hit her.
Anyway,
Mona was Cecil’s first girlfriend after we moved into together. At first, he was really excited about the
relationship, but she responded positively and I think that put him on his
guard. After about 10 or eleven dates,
he broke up with her. Neither seemed too
heartbroken over the split, however, so maybe it was for the best that they
didn’t pursue it further.
After the
breakup with Mona, Cecil dated a number of girls, but it became pretty clear
that there was a bit of a pattern. If
the girl started to show interest after a few dates, Cecil would lose
interest. Finally, about mid-year he
began dating a really cute girl named Linda.
She was excited and, surprisingly, so was he. She was cute, religious, and ambitious—the
perfect match. She was studying to be a
school teacher at the U and had only a semester
left before student teaching.
However, at the beginning of the 2nd semester she was given a
full-time job teaching, in spite of the fact that she had not completed her
studies. Apparently, a teacher had quit
at the semester and in a sort of desperation, they had offered Linda the job
with the promise that she could be hired on a permanent basis if she completed
most of her remaining school work during the summer. Her experience teaching was to count as
student teaching because another teacher would monitor her work.
Suddenly,
Linda’s relationship with Cecil took a decided back seat to her work in
school. Any dating during the week was
completely out and even on some weekends she said she was too busy preparing
her classes to date, even once. Cecil,
who was a school psychologist, and operated very much “by the clock”, had
little understanding or sympathy for her plight. He felt that there was no reason that Linda
could not, like himself, finish all her work at school—or at least, after an
hour of so of homework. Well, the upshot
was that Cecil decided that Linda was not showing enough commitment to their
relationship and he broke the engagement.
By this
time I was dating Shauna Bowman, who, later that summer, I would marry. Cecil in the meantime, was following in his
old pattern. But toward the end of the
school year, as Linda’s school schedule became less demanding, Cecil started
dating her again. She, however, had
become decidedly cool toward Cecil. To
fill in the times when Linda would not date him (which was most of the times),
Cecil began dating Shauna’s roommate Winnie.
Winnie was a very attractive girl made more so by the fact that she
sounded exactly, and acted much, like “Our Miss Brooks” (Eve Arden). The problem was that Cecil would use his
dates with Winnie as sounding boards for advice on how to win Linda back. Finally, Winnie became frustrated by this and
simply dropped him. Predictably, at that
point, Cecil decided that it was really Winnie that he liked, even better than
Linda.
I wish I
could report how Cecil finally wooed and won his bride, but I can’t. All I know is that about a year after I was
married, he showed up with her at out house.
It turns out that he had used his summer vacation to go to Uruguay . There he had met, wooed, and married his
wife, Trixie. When we knew them, Trixie
made the perfect wife for Cecil because she could hardly speak any English, but
knew enough of it to know when to laugh at his jokes.
Recently, I
spoke with Cecil, who lives and works in California ,
and he assures me that Trixie now speaks very good English. He didn’t say whether she still laughs at his
jokes. As a footnote, his oldest son
served at the same time as our second from the youngest (Austen) in Uruguay ,
where Cecil had served and found a wife after many a false start.
