I’ll give you five seconds to guess where I’m posting from. Onetwothreefourfive. Time’s up, suckah.
I’m posting from my friendly neighborhood Family History center. Right now an old man with a comb-over is giving me the evil eye because “Internet resources are reserved for the purpose of researching family history leads” (that’s what he told me three minutes ago when I was checking out the “microfiber vs. leather” controversy over at espn.com. Like he doesn’t do the same thing when no one’s watching). I know you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, didn’t you break up with your Mormon girlfriend and aren’t you living with your grandma in Pennsylvania?” She broke up with me, but other than that, yeah. My friendly neighborhood Family History center is at the Lancaster 1st ward, and my grandma is their newest family history specialist. My grandma was baptized two months ago. I can’t get away from Mormons.
Here’s how it went down. Last November my grandma had a stroke and my parents wanted me to go out and help take care of her and my grandpa. I had just bombed the GRE and gotten dumped, so it seemed like a good time to go. My mom drove across the country with me and all my earthly possessions in my 1993 Ford Taurus (with a $1500 rebuilt engine). We listened to The DaVinci Code on CD (Mom’s choice) and I barely kept myself from puking about every 7 minutes from Colorado to Illinois. We got to Pennsylvania by December 10th and Mom stayed until December 27th, getting everything set up and giving me an envelope with $300 in it before she left. That was nice of her.
Anyways, things went swimmingly with Grandma and Grandpa for the first couple of months. It took a little while to figure out how to put the right number of pills for the right days in about five different pill-boxes. I didn’t make any mistakes because I was scared shitless of sending one of them into cardiac arrest, but it did take me a while to get the hang of it. There were some other embarrassing/gross things that I had to figure out how to do. But it was okay, and I had nowhere else to go, so I never thought about leaving. I wouldn’t have thought about leaving anyway.
That’s when Seth and Melanie’s ward must have had a missionary sacrament meeting. Remember them? Seth was my roommate for a while; liked X-box; swore like a freaking sailor; married Melanie. One day I get this call from them asking for my address. That was amazing in itself, because my cell phone is out of range 98% of the time. But I happened to be driving back from Philly, so I gave them my grandparents’ address no questions asked. It didn’t occur to me to ask why they wanted it. When the missionaries knocked on our door three days later, I connected the dots and felt mildly pissed that Seth and Melanie had referred me like an Amway customer to their missionaries. But that’s okay—I decided to let them in, scare them with my uncanny knowledge about all things Mormon, and then send them on their way. And it would have worked, if Grandma hadn’t seen them come in and decided that she needed to make us some tea and cookies. So she comes hobbling in with a tray, and of course—you guessed it—the missionaries said they didn’t drink tea. That started a conversation about the Word of Wisdom, and then that started a conversation about prophets, and then that started a conversation about the Book of Mormon. Next thing I know, Grandma is asking me to read 1st Nephi to her instead of Habbakuk. We got through the whole Book of Mormon by June (the missionaries came for the first time in February) and she got baptized in August. Just like that. Seventy-nine years old.
I know what you’re thinking. Am I next? Hell if I know. I’ve got a few things on my calendar—retaking the GRE this Saturday, going to Philly on November 17th for the premiere of Casino Royale, hiking the Appalachian trail come March (I’m starting in Georgia)—and getting baptized isn’t one of them. But since I couldn’t even get away from Mormons in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I’m not ruling anything out.
When I woke up this morning, I thought, “It’s All Saints Day.” Pretty freaky, since I’m not Catholic and I don’t even know what the hell All Saints Day is. But it got me thinking about the saints I know in this life. Annegb is one of them (is your daughter still hot? Is she still dating that non-member dude? I wonder what she’s up to sometimes). Mari is another one (you’ll never know how many times she talked us out of banning DKL). I’ve always thought Jean Luc Picard was kind of a saint. I look at Septimus more as a wizard or a Norse god than a saint, sorry man. The families of the Amish schoolgirls who were killed last month. That one really smart chick over on Times and Seasons—Rosalynde Welch—she seems pretty saintly. But my favorite saint these days is my grandma, the latter-day saint. At night, after she takes her pills and washes the dishes and checks the deadbolt ten times, she calls for me to read to her from the Book of Mormon. She claims her eyesight is too bad to tell the words, but that’s bull crap, because every night she has me read something that’s directed at me. This was from last night’s reading: “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end.” So from one of your saints in Pennsylvania to the rest of you saints out in the bloggernacle, here’s to goodness and grace, today and always.