Short Story: The Homily

"The Homily"
by Juliana Joy Child

It was all thanks to Father George.  Business was booming at my father's store, W.R. Morse Clothing, due to a sudden surge of new customer interest, which seemed to have been brought on by the full page ad that Father George had purchased on the day of my parents' wedding.  Since then, sales had skyrocketed.  My parents were newly married, my parents were in love, my parents had found success, and therefore, my parents were happy.  I was born.  Juliana Marie, they named me.  The first name was in honor of my great aunt Julie.  The middle name was the same as my mother's.

My childhood was normal, pretty much what you'd expect for a kid growing up in the early 21st century.  My brother Andrew was born a year after I was, and two years later Elizabeth and Ethan came along.  My parents knew that they would both have to work full-time in order to provide for the four of us.  Fortunately, my father was earning enough money from clothing sales to send us to a really nice day care center in town, where we were taught to write our names and allowed to play for most of the day.  Meanwhile, my mother had landed herself a stable job as a medical coder.

I never got to spend much time with my parents.  Mom often worked overtime, and Dad was so busy, what with his business expanding and all.  He ended up opening new stores in three different locations in Massachusetts, and being the owner of the company, he had to travel a lot to ensure that everyone's work was "up to snuff," as he would say.  I understood.  Mom and Dad were working hard because they loved my siblings and me.  When I was 4 I asked my parents to sign me up for dance lessons because I wanted to wear pretty costumes like the ones I saw each year in the local Veterans' Day Parade.  My mother called the dance school and told them my age, and they said that classes for 3- and 4-year-olds met on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4:30.  Mom explained to me that there was just no way, since both she and Dad worked from 9 to 5 each day.

The year I turned 5, we had the best Christmas ever.  Mom and Dad bought these two new state-of-the-art computers for the house, one for them to do their work, and the other for the four of us to use to play games and watch videos.  We were so excited!  The computer presented a world of possibilities.  All of our relatives bought us cool computer games, all themed around different things...Spongebob Squarepants, Sesame Street, and, my personal favorite, The Powerpuff Girls.  Elizabeth and Ethan weren't quite old enough to use the computer yet, but Andrew and I spent the rest of Christmas vacation playing with this new toy.  It took a couple of years, but eventually the twins too graduated from the crayons and popsicle sticks of childhood play and learned to appreciate the world of fun that technology had to offer.

As a child, I struggled in school.  Math was the worst.  I would come home each night and work so hard to try and figure out the multiplication and division problems, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not make sense of the strange numbers and symbols.  Our babysitter was nice, but she was never much help.  By the time I was 10, I had started to hate school.  It was a constant reminder of how stupid I was.  I had friends, but I was still very shy in public.  I remember feeling that everyone except me was good at something.  As my siblings grew, I began to notice that they were having similar problems, and I wished I knew how to help them.  We were all introverted, quiet, average students who found it difficult to connect with other kids our age.  Sometimes I would get very upset, and I would go to the computer and start playing some mindless game that required the player to perform some mindless task, like popping bubbles.  Just pop the bubbles...pop the bubbles...pop the bubbles...

My main source of happiness was the piano.  I had asked to start taking lessons when I was 6, and Dad had agreed to drive me to the music school once a week at 7pm.  I loved practicing the piano.  It gave me a feeling of bliss that I couldn't quite define.  None of my friends knew that I played, though...I was much too shy and reserved to tell anyone about it.  I was afraid that someone would ask me to get up on a stage and perform, God forbid.  It was beyond stage fright; all throughout elementary school, I was afraid to even look people in the eye.

Middle school was better.  By then, Dad had expanded his business to five locations and we were seeing even less of him.  He claimed it was because he loved us even more.  Mom had been promoted to the position of manager in the coding firm.  Together they were making enough money to spoil my siblings and me rotten with toys, clothes, Apple products.  In school, I was still in lower level reading and math classes, but I had finally worked myself up to a point where I at least understood what the teacher was talking about most of the time.  I didn't get to see my elementary school friends as much anymore.  They had always been smarter than me, and they were placed in advanced classes.  It was lonely for a while, but I eventually made new friends.  My favorite thing about middle school was music class.  I was always really happy in music class, and it was there that I discovered something that I was really good at: singing.  And it was weird how it happened.  I was in fifth grade, and we were playing a game in music class where there were two teams and the teacher would call out a category, and the teams had to battle back and forth singing songs that fit into each category.  The game ended when one of the teams took more than ten seconds to think of a song.  The category was TV theme songs, and I knew a whole bunch of them, and I sang them out as they popped into my head, and I ended up winning for my team.  After class, the music teacher stopped me on the way out the door.

"You know, you have a beautiful singing voice," she said.

It had never even occurred to me that my voice was anything special.  "Really?" I replied, surprised and, being a shy child, intimidated by the whole exchange.

"Really," the music teacher said.  "You should join Chorus.  We rehearse on Monday mornings from 7:30 to 8:30."

I asked my parents and they said yes.  And that's how it all started.  From then on, for the remainder of my time in middle school, each week began with music, and I loved it.  I would float out of bed on Mondays, thrilled by the anticipation of getting to do something that brought me...joy.  That's what music was to me: joy.  Despite having a fairly happy childhood, being so well provided for by my parents, I had never experienced real joy until I joined Chorus.  Music taught me the difference between joy and happiness.  And I loved this new thing called "joy."  I had figured out by the time I finished middle school that I wanted to dedicate my life to bringing this joy of music to others.

I presented this notion, this dream, to my parents my junior year of high school.

"I'm going to be a choral conductor," I told them, sure in my heart that that was what my life's work was meant to be.  "I've already started looking at music schools.  I think I'll get a Music Education degree for my undergrad."

Mom looked thoughtful, not quite sure what to make of this.  Dad spoke up.  "Well, of course for college you should probably major in something more practical, like accounting or marketing.  My dream for you is that you'll take over the W.R. Morse Clothing company one day."

"I know, Dad," I said sharply, with an attitude.  I had heard it before.  All he seemed to care about in those days was his business.  "But you must not know me if you think I would enjoy that kind of work."

This was the first of many conversations of this nature, during which I was forced to defend music, my passion, my joy, and its importance.  I learned that my parents did not understand me.  But furthermore, I learned that they did not understand joy, and I guessed that they had never really felt it.    And I felt sorry for them.  Eventually I won; I convinced them that pursuing a Music Education degree was a worthy investment.  But I could not get over the fact that my joy was not enough for them, that it took so much persuasion for them to permit me to embrace that joy.

Senior year came.  This was also the year of my parents' 20th anniversary.  When the day came, we celebrated with a big sit-down dinner, which was a treat.  Afterwards, Mom took out their wedding video, which my siblings and I had never seen before, hooked up the old VCR, and put the tape in for all of us to watch.  It was strange to see my parents together in a world in which I had not yet come into existence.  And it was fun to see all of our family members, all dressed up and 20 years younger. There was my grandmother with only a few wrinkles on her face, her late husband beside her, all of my aunts and uncles with their huge 90s hairdos.  And there was Father George, the priest who performed the service.  All I knew about him was that he had purchased an ad for my father's business as a wedding present for my parents, and my parents credited that ad with the success of the company.

About half way through the service, it was time for the homily.  Father George left the altar momentarily and then returned with a small, plain cardboard box, small enough that he could hold it in the palm of his hand.  The homily that followed was like a wedding-themed episode of The Price is Right.  Father George explained that he wanted to give my parents a wedding present and that he had two options for them to choose from.  The first was a full-page newspaper ad for W.R. Morse Clothing Store, which was sure to bring money that could be used to support the family that they planned to build.  The second was the tiny box in his hand.  Father George would not say what was in the box, but he promised my parents that it was a rare and beautiful treasure, one that was hard to come by, one that must be sought out in order to be obtained.

As I watched, I felt strangely emotional.  I turned to my parents in the room.  "You chose the ad?" I asked.

"Yes," said my mother.  "We didn't know what was in the box and didn't want to take chances.  I think we can all agree that we made the right decision."

My father nodded in agreement.  I said nothing.  I sat in silence for the rest of the homily, unable to focus on it.  My thoughts were wandering.  There was something about my parents' choice that bothered me to the core.  Of course I did not know for sure what was in the box, but somehow I could not shake the feeling that, whatever it was, it was meant to be mine.  I wanted it.  I knew that, given the choice, I would have chosen to take the box from Father George, the box that held something rare, something beautiful, something worth fighting for, because I knew of one thing that fit that description, one thing that my parents had rejected twenty years ago, one thing that I hungered for and that I planned to seek out every day for the rest of my life.  And that one thing was joy.

Joy, I thought.  Joy was truly the greatest gift that my parents could have received.  I thought to myself...if they had chosen joy over wealth and material riches, perhaps they would have spent more time with their children.  Perhaps they would have bought us art supplies and toy drums instead of a computer that one Christmas, and we would have grown up to be more creative, independent individuals.  Perhaps then school wouldn't have been so difficult.  Perhaps if I hadn't heard "No" from my parents so many times, I would have had more opportunities to grow.  Perhaps if I saw myself as the joy of my parents' life, I would have had more confidence in myself, and then, perhaps, I might have found joy much sooner.  Perhaps everything would have been different if it weren't for Father George.



Backstory: This is a fictional story with certain parts based on events from my life.  There really was a priest, Father George, who gave a homily at my parents' wedding where he offered them two different gifts from which to choose: an ad for my dad's store or a tiny box with a surprise inside.  (Not a literal box; he asked them to imagine one).  In real life, they chose the box, and it contained JOY.  The lesson of the homily was that you need to choose joy over wealth and trivial things in life, and that there can be no joy unless you actively look for it.  This idea was so important to my parents that they named me Juliana Joy.  My middle name is very important to me because it represents my family's values.  This story is a glance at how my life might have been different if my parents had chosen the other gift, and, in doing so, chosen to live an entirely different kind of life.