Seeing the movie “Up” yesterday with my wife reminded me that I not only had a story about the Navy’s airship “Shenandoah” to put up on my blog, but also this frontispiece illustration. The “Moonbeam” was the catalyst of Hugh McAlister’s 1930 novel “The Flight of the Silver Ship: Around the World Aboard a Giant Dirigible.” I read this as a kid and still have a copy and have even reread the story, although I can’t offhand remember the plot.

Margaret in her 20s

The last time I ever stayed overnight with my grandmother, Margaret Irene McDunn Tillotson, I made away with three artifacts. Handling the exhibits of the Great Tillotson Museum was generally forbidden, with outright appropriation of them being unthinkable. Once, when I was 18, I had managed to elude the curators and smuggle out the four-string tenor guitar from Aunt La Rose’s closet. She lived in California by then and probably had forgotten all about her tenor guitar. I started lessons with an old blind lady, but after just a few, Grandma intervened. Of course she intervened. She always did. In no uncertain terms she demanded the guitar’s return, having determined that La Rose simply wouldn’t approve of her guitar being strummed while she was 2000 miles away. I received a compensatory six-string from Grandma for Christmas, but that beautifully lacquered red Fender, lacking the two bass strings, was unique and special. I had no desire to play the conventional six-string like everybody and his brother. The Fender was retired to the closet and I suppose it remains there, guarded now by Uncle Michael, who lived with Grandma then and acquired the house and its precious contents after her death.

On that final overnight visit, a stagnant smell pervaded the place. It might have been owing to problems they experienced with the septic system, yet those were restricted to the deepest parts of winter. My mother forthrightly called it “B.M.” There was no denying Grandma had always been preoccupied with that bodily function. When we grandchildren were young, she spooned cod liver oil and Milk of Magnesia into our mouths as soon as we arrived on a visit, and we often weren’t permitted to flush until she had inspected our stool. It wasn’t until I saw the movie “The Road to Wellville,” about Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium and the practice of colonic irrigation, that I realized her preoccupation wasn’t strictly personal and idiosyncratic but instead was largely cultural, a widely dispersed fog, a miasma of merde, that had shrouded her childhood in the first two decades of the 20th century. Kellogg’s pursuit of the squeaky-clean intestine had influenced the American public in those years. On top of this was the fact that Grandma’s own mother had died of rectal cancer, which couldn’t have been pretty, and it wouldn’t surprise me if B.M. somehow got the blame. Doctors could say what they wanted, but Grandma knew where that kind of cancer came from! The thing was, no one could tell whether she was trying to save up or eliminate. Many fresh fruits—cherries, for example—were said by her to “make you go to the bathroom,” and by the way she said it, that seemed a bad thing. Our mother had told my sister that Grandma used to receive frequent enemas as a child. I can imagine the trauma of this forced entry, instigated by a loony four-flusher from Battle Creek and implemented at the discretion of adults with devious purposes.

The house she lived in with Uncle Michael was built using the same slip-formed concrete techniques that Tillotson Construction & Development had worked out for the construction of grain elevators. It had a modern rectilinear character and featured a curving wall of opaque glass blocks in the small entry foyer. The living and dining areas adjoined each other without a barrier. They were trimmed with what Grandma called “surfwood,” a veneer with a gnarled texture. In the layout of the house and the selection of décor and accessories, she had been given no particular say. She once bought a lamp and mirror for the front room—it was never called the living room—but Grandpa ordered her to take them back. In an act of defiance, she left the mirror on the wall.

Mary Catherine, North High band member, 1953, at the front door of the new house.

The picture windows on the west and north walls afforded sweeping views of the churning Ponca Hills of eastern Nebraska, but even though she was positioned higher on her knoll than anyone around, the curtains were drawn so that no one could see in. What was there to see? An old woman in a housedress and slippers reading the World-Herald, her youngest son anchored in his own chair, the new couch between them like a floating dock. Their feet pointed toward the television with the Champagne Music Maker about to come onto the screen. These perches were elevated about 50 feet above the road, but Grandma must have suspected motorists could somehow manipulate their mirrors to peer into her soul and descry her hesitancy about donating to the parish’s growth fund or her anguish about my youngest brother’s failures in high school. She had been asking me to encourage him: tell him to come each day to class with a preparation ready and give it all you’ve got, I’m right behind you. Her exhortations betrayed the rah-rah, can-do sentiments that are found in newspaper ads and self-improvement manuals of the period between 1890 and 1920. All a fellow really needed was to have his morale improved, you can’t keep a good man down, just steer clear of conniving females. (“The girls or woman [sic] are such targets and destroyers of peoples’ success,” she wrote.) “I know Robert has a head full of more knowledge than many others who got their piece of paper—but that piece of paper comes first so many places—This should make Rob say—‘I’m not down’ I’ll show them all I’ll make more out of life than the most of my friends—This should be a boost for him.” He didn’t graduate with his class and needed $150 to complete some credits in the summer. “Grandma will come forth again with this—hoping he’d faithful[ly] finish the courses this time.”

Grandma, also my godmother, helps me face the unhappy prospect of baptism, 1955.

She was also preoccupied with my parents, whose crazy threats to sell their house and move to Florida were starting to seem real. “I’m talking [sic] MC and Walter to get busy and forget about selling out—They could do it—‘where there’s a will there’s a way.’” She had helped them out financially and could hardly resist helping them some more, but felt that if she did she would only exacerbate the situation. “You didn’t think Grandma gets at ‘low ebb’ at times—so a little tonight. My relief—my prayers and trust in God. There is no road but has a turn—let’s hope it will be for the greatest happiness.” But my father’s restlessness was more powerful than her prayers. That’s how we found ourselves staying overnight, a truckload of household effects waiting to start for Florida in the morning. I was riding shotgun to keep my father company and help unload at the journey’s end. Even on the way out of town, we had to rely on Grandma for support. Naturally, she worried about us.

“You’re going through New Orleans, aren’t you?” she asked.

Why would we make a 90-degree turn at New Orleans in order to get from Omaha to Florida? As I pointed out, the direct route ran through St. Louis, Nashville, and Atlanta.

“Your brakes will go out in the mountains, dear.” 

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The front bedroom and bath adjoined the living room, but the two back bedrooms and baths were reached through the dining room. The bathrooms were always noteworthy because of the blue porcelain fixtures and the toilets’ elongated bowls. Even when the house was just 10 years old, the water supply was feeble; it took ages to pour barely enough bathwater into one of the tubs. As much as he had benefitted from the Tillotsons’ generosity and forbearance, my father never had anything positive to say about them, and he sounded typically scornful in attributing the trickling bathwater to Grandpa’s cheapness, having directed a tiny water line uphill from the old house where the family had first lived.

My sister Kate and I in Grandma's front room, Christmas 1959.

The other two levels of the new concrete house were the more intriguing. Just between the living and dining rooms, where Grandma’s organ sat, a dauntingly steep flight of carpeted stairs led up to the game floor. The entire surface area of this upper level was devoted to fun. One long room to the right contained two billiards tables (one with and the other without pockets), and there was a small sink with a faucet that acutely suffered from the low water pressure, so that not even a trickle could be coaxed from it. The drain was home to enormous black beetles that my mother called waterbugs. Of course, given the conspicuous lack of water, they should more accurately have been called drainbugs. They served as an indicator species for dessication.

To the left of the head of the stairs, a large L-shaped section was divided into three segments. The first was an unheated square enclosure with the two outer walls of opaque glass blocks and a floor covered with pea gravel. It was as though something didn’t add up in the design drawings, but Grandpa decided to make the dead space interesting. Sometimes I opened the door to this small odd room and stood there experiencing the mystery. Back inside the house proper, another long room had some arm chairs and rockers and a battered upright piano, and I guess teenagers were supposed to jitterbug there, although we were now in the era of the frug. The room’s other segment corresponded to the base of the “L.” Outfitted with a dilapidated Ping-Pong table and a jukebox that played 78-rpm records such as “Three Coins in a Fountain,” it completed the teen clubhouse.

Then there was the garage: a drive-in basement with a single retracting door but enough parking to accommodate four cars. You descended the iron stairs, clank, clank, clank, from the kitchen at great peril, for there was no railing. The room was poorly lit and smelled of dust and grease and rotting upholstery. Making entry from the driveway, one lane forked off to the right and the other stayed left. For as long as I could remember, Uncle Michael took three-quarters of the space for his old Fords, some whole, others in parts. Grandma always laughed it off as youthful foolishness, although toward the end of her life, after his junk had become the source of neighbors’ enforcement complaints, she might have recognized the true nature of his hoarding.

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Margaret visits our house in west Omaha, summer 1968

By the time of my final overnight visit, Grandma had lived in the house for about 35 years, and she had long passed the point of no return as far as needing to sort through her own stuff. She lacked file cabinets, so documents, cards, and letters were stacked on every flat surface. There was a recess behind the washer and dryer in the kitchen, which was split down the middle by a breakfast counter and stools for six hungry people. Besides all that the recess harbored, I think even the top of the dryer supported its own burden of memorabilia, and I doubt it was a symbiotic relationship as in the case of the birds that perch on the backs of cows (although it did suggest the way that Grandma herself had always shouldered burdens). Stacks had accumulated on the buffet in the dining room and even up on the big table. Grandma and Michael certainly took all meals at the kitchen breakfast nook. The tide was starting to go out on holiday celebrations anyway. At Easter there had only been 10 when they had planned for 15—”but the dinner was a satisfaction for me, even if I do the complimenting. We had sirloin roast and yours truly did the carving etc etc. The gentlemen were who we missed.” Grandma was by now in her 80s, often short of breath, and hardly up to much work. “My tune is getting cut a lot every day,” she said, referring to the onset of the congestive heart failure that ultimately caused her death. Some of the family, including yours truly, had already moved away from Omaha. The Fourth of July was “the time we generally see everybody—but this year will be different. Seems everyone took off in his own direction. Wanted to have the 4th here one more year—Where will everyone be next Fourth?” I remember hearing in subsequent years about holiday celebrations at a restaurant. As for the clutter, even the little table between her white chair and the sofa had stacks of its own and a unframed glass to magnify the print. Of course, Michael’s area had deep deposits of magazines and thick volumes of a vintage car trading book. He had tipped the lampshade to throw light across his lap, and his miserliness led him to read with a handheld magnifier rather than buy himself cheap drugstore glasses. Grandma’s reading matter included a Catholic newspaper and a book, “Purgatory,” which I guess she perused like a Michelin guide to her next travel destination: “Ah, the delicate scents! The delicious flavors! The enchanted nights of Purgatory!”

Yours Truly and Uncle Michael, Christmas 1969, with the drapes drawn, as always.

Besides smelling like B.M., the slip-formed house was freezing cold. “Like a dungeon,” my father said. The baseball playoffs were on TV in late October. I watched the game in my jacket. Maybe Grandma just hadn’t turned on the furnace yet for the season. It occurred to me that I had no idea where in the house the furnace was located. To my question on this, she tapped the thermostat, saying, “Right here.” I was supposed to sleep in the front bedroom, La Rose’s room, the guitar room, and at bedtime Grandma stripped the comforter off the bed and casually tossed it into the corner, offering me an electric blanket, instead. I declined this and retrieved the comforter.

When we had arrived I found the sink stoppered in that bathroom. Cold water dribbling from the faucet drained out through the overflow. Maybe this had been the caprice of a grandchild during another visit.

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After returning from Sunday Mass, Grandma fixed breakfast for me, my father, and Uncle Michael. She cooked at the gas range that was the last in a line of appliances from left to right along the wall: Frigidaire, deep freeze, stove. She used a two-pronged tool and skidded bacon strips into the skillet over a high flame. When the bacon was crispy she piled it on a plate at the back of the range, and then fried eight eggs in the sea of grease. The eggs roared and popped and spat enough to warrant the use of a fireproof suit. Meanwhile, she wielded a spatula at a second skillet while putting in an appalling amount of margarine. This was for the French toast. When everything was ready I accepted one piece. By this point in my life, bacon grease and margarine seemed downright evil. I declined any eggs from the plate she proffered. “Why?” she asked. “The grease is fresh.”

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I made away with a classic white diner-style coffee mug that Grandpa had used. I also got an anodized aluminum drinking glass that was quite battered. I thought I’d never see such a thing again, but after finding dozens and dozens of them at a swap meet, I let it slip out of my possession. From the medicine chest in La Rose’s bathroom I pilfered a Glacier Crystal Alum Block “For After Shaving.” The Walgreens price tag said 44 cents. I’ve never mentioned it till now, just in case she might extend a hand from the grave, wagging her fingers as a sign to bring it all back.

Uncle Michael filled the garage with his old Fords and scattered them over much of the property. Here, in 1983, was the scene at the paddock. The house was on eight acres, which included a stable, tennis court, and pool.

The Tillotson Construction Story: http://baggyparagraphs.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/the-tillotson-construction-story/

The Nebraska Cornhuskers used to win the Big Eight football title and get to the Orange Bowl pretty regularly. The Cornhuskers first appeared in the Miami classic in 1955, the year of my birth, losing to fourteenth-rated Duke, 34-7. Returning twice in the 1960s, they had a win over Auburn and a loss to Alabama. Then, in the 28-year period that started in 1971, the road between Nebraska and Florida was traveled 14 times. During that same epoch, the Cornhuskers also played five Fiesta Bowls, three Sugar Bowls, and one Cotton Bowl when it still counted as a biggie. People in my home state got used to planning for an early winter vacation, and Miami was the preferred destination.

Quarterback Scott Frost led Nebraska in the 1998 Orange Bowl.

Miami was a hell of a long way off to us kids who grew up secure in our provincialism. Omaha seemed like the true center of the United States. I couldn’t figure out why the evening news programs like the NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” which aired from 1956 to 1970, concentrated so much on what happened in Washington and New York. So what if Chet Huntley’s anchor desk was in New York and David Brinkley sat his bum down in Washington for each broadcast? Omaha had big companies and important things going on. The Union Pacific railroad was headquartered there, and of course Mutual of Omaha sponsored the weekly “Wild Kingdom” program from 1963 onward, challenging a boy like me to calculate the logistics of getting Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler from our city on the Mighty Mo—the Missouri River—to the Serengeti Plain of Africa on a weekly basis. Did I say there were large undertakings? The reeking Omaha stockyards were vast. It frankly shocked and disappointed me to learn Chicago had stockyards as well. Everything Omaha did, Chicago had to copy or steal. The Chicago Bears had the greatest running back in the National Football League, Gale Sayers, who just happened to have grown up in Omaha. It’s a good thing no one confused me with the information that Marlin Perkins had been director of Chicago’s Lincoln Park zoo.

On top of all this other stuff was Omaha’s importance in the Cold War. Just south of the city, which is situated near the geographic center of the country and therefore at a point far away from Russian missiles, Offutt Air Force Base was home of the Strategic Air Command, where all-out nuclear war could be directed from a bunker. We were used to looking at B-52s rumbling overhead as they approached the base. Later, the 747s of the airborne command center joined the procession. And an allied country occasionally contributed an exotic aircraft like the otherworldly delta-winged British Vulcan bomber. It instilled the belief that Omaha’s real significance far exceeded anything the modest metropolitan population of 400,000 would suggest.

And then the Cornhuskers won their national titles in 1970 and 1971. The four previous champs had been Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, and Texas. It must be remembered that throughout the 1960s, the slogan on our license plates boasted “The Beef State.” A head count barely produced 1.5 million Nebraskans. Omaha and Lincoln accounted for about one-third of the state’s population. The next largest city was Grand Island, with something like 35,000 people. The teeming Memorial Stadium game-day crowd of fans clad in scarlet and cream more than doubled that total. I remember my surprise upon learning the small cities in the population range of 15,000 to 25,000 like Columbus, North Platte, Hastings, Fremont, and Norfolk (which we pronounced NOR-fork), indeed, these cities had their own daily newspapers. It seemed like a waste of time when they could have just read the World-Herald, along with us Omahans, and found everything they needed to know. Anyhow, nothing besides natural-born killers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate had ever happened outstate (and their murder spree was a kind of national champion of its own, unlike anything previously, at least outside of gangland). How could a state with just three congressional districts come away with the national football title? We must have been naturally superior.

With its national championships, Nebraska not only joined the ranks of elite programs from huge states, we kicked their asses. Orange Bowl appearances in 1971, 1972, and 1973 resulted in three victories. We squeaked past LSU, 17-12, in that first one. But the next year’s game against Bear Bryant’s houndstooth hat was a 38-6 blowout. And the next year provided the utmost gratification for someone who loathed, detested, and reviled all the claptrap about Notre Dame. Quarterback Tom Clements led the Fighting Irish, but the Cornhuskers’ David Humm only needed to rely on Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Rodgers, who jittered and juked for three rushing touchdowns, tossed a 52-yard pass to Frosty Anderson for six more points, and later received a 50-yard TD lob from his lefty QB. The Irish trailed 40-0 after three quarters, when the Cornhuskers’ scrubs went in and surrendered six points. As a footnote to all this, I should include that the vacation and victory destination for 1974 was the Cotton Bowl, where we defeated Texas, 19-3.

As I say, we Nebraskans were becoming aristocrats of football and had begun to take for granted a nice excursion, at least to Dallas or New Orleans if not to semitropical Miami. But then Coach Bob Devaney retired, handing off the Cornhuskers to Tom Osborne, and it was a while before he could beat Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners in the Big Eight. After a few tries, we did manage to drop the Sooners in 1978, the reward being a league title and, alas, a rematch with them New Year’s Day in Miami. (Oklahoma won by a touchdown.) Our next Orange Bowl, in 1982, was the first of another skein of three appearances, which culminated in the unforgettable loss to the Miami Hurricanes, 31-30, when our two-point conversion attempt failed with 48 seconds remaining and the ’Canes spoiled our undefeated season and claimed the national title.

A couple of years later, in the autumn of 1986, my parents, who were lifelong Nebraskans, startled everybody by announcing they were moving to the Tampa Bay area. They were in their mid-50s, so this wasn’t retirement. My father just wanted a change. He had once mentioned his dream of puttering up and down the Gulf coast of Florida in a boat. They made their plans accordingly.

Julie before going to work at Casa's in 1987.

Not too long before they loaded the truck and headed off, my younger sister, Julie, then 24 years old, called up to say she had decided to go along with them to Florida.

“I wonder what I should do about the two-hundred-and-seventy-five dollar red-leather outfit I put on layaway,” she said.

Hearing this from her made me cringe. Not only did I happen to know, through our mother, that Julie’s credit cards were maxed out, but there was also the delicate consideration of whether such a costume was in exquisitely good taste. The owners of the shop probably had my sister specifically in mind when they acquired such a clamorous item of apparel for their inventory.

“You can take it off layaway, can’t you?” I asked.

“Oh, I definitely plan to buy it.”

“Red leather?”

“Yeah, for the football games.”

“How many Nebraska football games will you go to in Tampa?”

“I could wear it to the Orange Bowl.”

Maybe she should also have picked out a space suit in case NASA invited her along on the shuttle. The Cornhuskers next appeared in the Orange Bowl in 1989. My sister had initially gone to work at Hooters, but as our brother Dan subtly expressed it, “I think she put on a little weight and they had to let her go.” If she kept the red leather outfit and was still able to wriggle into it, good times lay ahead: during a seven-year stretch of the 1990s, the Cornhuskers qualified for the Orange Bowl six times, winning three of those games and bringing two more national championship trophies back to Lincoln. The year they weren’t in Miami, they claimed yet another national title at the Fiesta Bowl, hammering Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators, 62-24, and reinforcing lessons about the essentiality of Nebraska to a new generation of youngsters from Omaha to Benkelman.

The Great Siege of Nielsen Drive occurred in August 1986 and lasted five days. The Grand Dame and Ishmael ate up our groceries, guzzled my beer and pop, used an impressive quantity of toilet paper, and generally denuded the small apartment of resources. Never once did they ask to use the phone yet tied it up for two hours a time. On the first night of their stay, they fought bitterly, and in the middle of it all I finally excused myself and joined Susan in bed. The only circumstance working in our favor was that our dog would have killed their cat, and besides that Susan is allergic to cats, so they kept it in their truck. Naturally, on that first night, the cat escaped.

The advance warning of their visit had been a note with “See you soon!” written on the envelope’s lower left corner, not far from our Ann Arbor address. The Grand Dame’s message said she was on an extensive motor trip and heading our way around the first week of August. The only mention of her husband—whom we had never met—was implicit in the next paragraph: “If you don’t want me to show up unannounced, write me your phone #. Week after next, I’ll be at in-laws.” She included an address in Arroyo Grande, California. “Don’t worry,” she wrote, “I have my own accommodations + will only be in Michigan visiting relatives for a couple of days.”

God strike me dead if I actually sent her the phone number.

The accommodations she referred to were a pickup with a camper unit that was fully loaded with junk and cargo and therefore unaccommodating. In fact, the camper was so badly overloaded that the pickup had been blowing its tires at regular intervals. The Grand Dame and Ishmael set up on the sofa bed in our living room, making us hostages in our own home. Ishmael strewed things around—papers, sci-fi novels, dishes—so that it looked like the beach at low tide. He dispensed advice on what kind of computer to get, what motorcycle would be the best choice, what coffee was superior, and how to prepare one dish and another. A great bearded five-year-old, he spent a good hour in the bathroom in the morning, when the exhaust roared like a rocket.

They arrived on Thursday, announcing their departure for Saturday. Meanwhile, the top priority for Friday was an expected transfer of funds by wire. I remembered how the Grand Dame once needed fast cash for her project to excavate early Russian contact points in the Aleutians. She asked all her friends and relatives for a small donation. “They either get sore,” she said, “in which case one knows who one cannot count on in a pinch, or they’re excited about the prospect of getting cited as a donor in a write-up.”

I’m not the sort of person who gets excited about the prospect of being cited in a write-up. Call me sorehead.

The wire they expected didn’t come through on Friday, so the Grand Dame and Ishmael were ours for the weekend. Hearing this news, I dribbled my basketball down to the playground and worked on my jump shot.

I vaguely knew the Grand Dame from my year of graduate school in Fairbanks. We had exchanged two letters in the three years since my departure from Alaska. She was an Army veteran who had earned a master’s degree in English and was working on another in geoarcheology, after which she planned to pursue a Ph.D. in geophysics. When she finished with her doctorate, she wanted to become an astronaut. None of this made a bit of sense, and not just to me: one of my fellow graduate students had never been able to say her name without exclamatory derision. She was a know-it-all and evidently thought of herself as Pauline Bunyan. I was the first female soldier to receive combat mountaineering training. Early in graduate school, I established and funded a scholarship foundation for Middle Eastern women. I expanded my knowledge of Southwest Asian languages. I made many discoveries and a number of findings. I helped to rescue thousands of the Kara Kirghiz who were trapped in Afghanistan. I developed political connections in Washington. I helped to have millions of acres set aside as wilderness.

Her speaking of becoming an astronaut made me smirk. She was carrying a lot of extra weight and might’ve gotten herself stuck in a hatch. And her quirks would drive fellow astronauts crazy on a long journey. She drank Coke with her bacon and eggs. I would’ve bet that’s not allowed in space. She tossed her toenail clippings into her tennis shoes. The toenail filtration system on the International Space Station would have been inadequate for a gal like her. If she was so smart and accomplished, why had she married a goddamned loser like Ishmael? He leaned back on the teak chair at our table and cracked one of the legs. We hastened to assure him it had been broken before, but Ishmael had joined a select group of slobs who tipped rearward on the hind legs of our delicate chairs, destroying the furniture we had bought with our wedding money. Perhaps bent on humiliating him, I required his companionship the next time at the basketball court, and he gawked at the spheroid as if it had come from outer space. All he could dribble was saliva.

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On Saturday morning, besides the discovery that her cat had escaped the camper overnight, the Grand Dame informed everyone that she was constipated. This great veteran of mountain warfare training in Arctic conditions, and the future explorer of deep space, spent the forenoon in the bathroom. A laxative was provided, and the great drama of whether she could relieve her bowels had us on pins and needles. Maybe the sounds that emanated from her sequestration were in keeping with a full review of her Pushtu and Farsi language skills. Or could she have been acquiring an Athabaskan tongue? Ishmael lazed around with a book until she ordered him to go out in their truck and search for the cat.

Meanwhile, I took the dog for a walk in the nearby park and found a familiar bum passed out under a picnic table. Her name was Earlene. I’d encountered her many times. She loved to throw the ball to Bissell. She also could be counted upon to ask for money. Her boyfriend was a black man who always let her do the panhandling. Today, Earlene was soaking wet—her clothes and her hair—and I guessed she had been in the creek. I woke her and asked what had happened. She was blind drunk, could barely stand up, and smelled like a pig. Her knees kept buckling like a fat rag doll’s.

She started cussing her boyfriend. He had thrown her in the creek, apparently trying to drown her. I asked if she had a place to go, and she recited an address. I went back home and got Susan and the car. We covered the backseat with an old bedspread. Returning to the park, I picked up Earlene, who had passed out again. Susan had sent along some cookies, but Earlene only wanted a cigarette. I drove up Pontiac Trail to a housing project where she lived with the man and his niece. Before she crawled up the steps to the front door, I made her promise not to tell who’d brought her home.

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The rest of Saturday passed quietly enough with our houseguests, and on Sunday I cleaned the brown splash marks from the underside of the toilet seat. By midmorning Monday we all could revel in the news that the wire transfer had come through. The Grand Dame and Ishmael would soon be on their way. Before leaving, though, she wanted to put out fliers offering a $100 reward for the cat, which somehow had escaped Ishmael’s pursuit on Saturday. Fliers were made up and distributed, and we bade our guests farewell.

About twenty minutes after they rolled off, the phone rang. Our nutty neighbor Barbara had noticed the flyer, and when she saw the cat run into the foyer of her building, she trapped it. I went over there with Bissell’s airline kennel and coaxed the kitty inside. It would stay there until the Grand Dame and Ishmael completed their 5000-mile return trip to Fairbanks, via Arroyo Grande.

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In all the years since, I’ve only rarely thought of how the Grand Dame and Ishmael laid siege to our apartment. Usually, the thought was accompanied by a bit of snickering over the Grand Dame’s aspirations to complete her second master’s degree and get a doctorate and take off into space. She was thirty-three years old when she came to visit and had said the master’s program looked like a five-year deal, and I knew Ph.D. programs can stretch on for years. She might qualify for her AARP card and space travel at about the same time.

On a whim the other day I searched the Web and found copious documentation of the last twenty-three years. The Grand Dame and Ishmael have divorced and remarried other people. He is wed to a woman who grew blimpy fat and needed to have a biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch. To pay for the operation, her elderly mother mortgaged the house. Ishmael and his wife were still going to be left with a $25,000 bill, which was more than they had earned in all of the previous year. The couple reside just down the road from Arroyo Grande.

Meanwhile, the Grand Dame upgraded her driver’s license and became a trucker, carrying her doctoral dissertation materials in a milk crate beside the rig’s gear lever. She taught psychology, became a therapist, and managed a residential treatment center. She traveled to remote Russian outposts and carried out research concerning people who live and work together in extreme environments. Around the time she completed her doctorate—in her mid-40s, just as I’d predicted—she was accepted by NASA as a mission specialist candidate and remained four years in the active selection files. Marriage to another astronaut occurred. She settled in as a college professor and immersed herself in Democratic Party politics. And most recently she became embroiled in an extremely harrowing controversy in Afghanistan. While consulting at the Bagram base, she was targeted for sexual harassment and even received an oblique death threat, with someone including “Mata la vaca,” or “Kill the cow,” in a things-to-do list written on a dry-erase board.

The Grand Dame continueth as the Grand Dame.

ab

We kept the cat in the kennel. Bissell’s aggressiveness and Susan’s allergies simply didn’t permit anything else. After about two weeks, Ishmael called up at 11.30 p.m.—we have always gone to bed by 10.00 p.m.—to say they had reached Fairbanks, no particular trouble with blowouts along the Alaska Highway, and could I ship the cat home? He expected me to see after all details. I told him to go ahead and make arrangements from his end and give a quick call to let me know the number of the departing flight. We could hardly have been happier to meet it at the Detroit airport. Susan and I both recall that I had to prepay the charges with our credit card. I do think I was repaid by the Grand Dame and Ishmael. But I don’t think Barbara ever received her $100 reward.

While I was enduring the eighth grade at St. Pius X School, a dear and devoted person crossed in and out of my life. Debi was my first girlfriend. A student at J. Sterling Morton Junior High, she lived less than a mile away from me, but I hadn’t know her before and someone must have matched us up, or perhaps we met at the roller rink. For no apparent reason that I could discern, she cherished me and put a lot of effort and enthusiasm into our friendship. I was surprised at my great catch. She was not only a pretty girl but also four or five inches taller than I. We were together just a few times, but one of those meetings I’ve never forgotten. At a construction site midway between our homes in fast-growing west Omaha, we passed an hour inside a cozy den someone had made of straw bales. You had to crawl inside it and couldn’t stand up once you’d entered, which suited us fine. At one of the nearby building lots, some fresh concrete had just been poured, and before we did our crawling we did some scrawling, for Debi—who, as you will see, held romantic notions about life—suggested I write our initials in the blank slate of this wet new pavement. Being already well along the road to Baggy Paragraphs, I did one better than initials and went for the self-incrimination of entire names. Among her many other attributes, Debi was also a sensible girl. As I arrived at the R-o-n-n-i of the intended Ronnie + Debi, likely meaning to inscribe our surnames as well, and maybe even our Social Security numbers, she interrupted, and we retreated to our lair of love. It was merely the first time I’ve benefited from feminine judiciousness.

Worse luck for me, though: After just a couple of months, in January of 1969, Debi’s family betook themselves to Overland Park, Kansas. I’ve often thought of her since. Now, for the first time ever, I’ve reread her letters and found myself laughing and being charmed all over again. She evinces such happiness and fulfillment. Of course she was just 13 years old and demonstrates some strange intellectual lapses and the insecurities and petulance and bossiness that might be expected, but overall she emerges from the pages as a well-balanced person, not to mention an excellent writer and observer. Her accounts of the drill squad cliffhanger and the Super Bowl exultation are exquisite.

My great point about people is that character is established early and indelibly. We might learn to temper our behavior and deal with responsibility and so forth, but deep inside, the fundamental traits persist unabated. An exuberant but responsible 13-year-old probably stands a good chance of a decent life 40 years later. Meanwhile, we reserve our pity for the moody youngster haunted by complexity.

Here, with last names abbreviated where they appear in the original and with creative spelling solutions reproduced faithfully, are the letters and the artwork Debi transmitted through Franny and Nancy, a pair of sisters who lived near her but attended St. Pius.

ab

Dear Ronnie,

I can go to the Westroads tonite. But I have to go with Sherry & Nancy so you can get some boys to go down with you or come alone.

Do you ever have anything like selling candy bars at your school? We do and its the this time to sell them. I guess I will sell ‘em cause for the grade that sells the most candy bars they get a swim party, you have to sell 12 to be able to do.

They had the Security Patrol out there because of the initials. Nancy to[ld] Jerry to go erase them. That is Cindy A________’s brother.

I don’t think I’ll forget what you look like now. We can get some pictures taken of us if ya want to.

You better at least give your mom a hint that you like me. She maybe getting ideas that your doing things behind her back.

I got my hair trimmed just a little but so it’ll grow faster.

Try not to leave words out of your sentences.

See ya tonite. At what time?

Luv ya,

Debi

P.S. Are you going to walk down with us or should we meet you down there? Be sure and answer this question.

Dear Ronnie,

I’m so sorry I wasn’t there yesterday, but Jolene made up some excuse that she had Deby G____ over and I had told her something to tell you but she couldn’t even be kind enough to do that. Goes to show your good friends (you think) wouldn’t even do me a deed in need.

Too bad you lost. If I was there yelling for you, I bet you would have won the game for me, wouldn’t you?

I couldn’t meet you at Jolene’s because her mother doesn’t approve of that (me coming over too meet you). But I sure could and would meet you at that place where they are building the house. I hope you know where that is! Same time, too.

I’m sorry, but I guess I’m just a fool. I read that note out loud (brains?) in front of Franny and Sherry. Franny is going to tease you too. That snot. Boy she makes me mad. I’d rather you’d give the note to Nancy than Franny (if you could).

I always dream about you! I’m glad I won too. Nancy said Jeff still likes me and there was going to be a fight to the finish. If Jeff would have won, I would have taken you no matter what. (That’s supposed to be true, too.)

I’m sorry about that night after the basketball game. But I read that boys always have a test they give to a girl to see if you’re willing to do what he wants, if he doesn’t like the results he drops her. I sure didn’t want to be dropped by you! Too bad I disappeared.

Steve B_______ doesn’t like me, in fact I think he thinks I’m a queer. I hope it doesn’t change your mind about me. Jolene has a big mouth, so I’m not going to tell her anything any more. She even told Steve I was going with you. He is the last person in the world I’d want to know.

Are you going to that Nutcracker Suite? We are going on Thursday of this week. Big fun.

Franny and Nancy are trying to talk me into getting my haircut like Jody A_____’s? Should I? They think I’ll look cuter? Huh! Me. Forget it. Not me.

My mom got her tooth drilled today, so I had to play nurse. Then to seal Christmas cards & put stamps on. Icky taste it leaves. Just think I played nurse & mailman in one day.

You sure write cool for a boy. I mean all boys I know are very, very messy writers. But not you.

Do you want me to meet you at that place alone I hope? I’ll be sure to wear a warm coat so I won’t be cold.

As far as I’m concerned (on my oponion) nothing could make me break up with you (maybe if you mom found out). Couldn’t you talk to your mom and explain the situation? I want to be able to be welcome in your house and meet your family.

Luv you,

Debi

P.S. I think I’ll seal this letter with a kiss. Dumb aren’t I? See if you can find out what our lucky number is You do it by putting your first & last name & my first and last name, write them in square letters. Like so:

DEBI=16

Each line is 1. And so on.

    1

1 £ 1

    1

The number I got is 92. 46 is yours and 46 in mine, too.

[Supertext to next letter] I figured out mine was 46. You must not know how to spell my last name. I got 46 for you 2.

12/3/68

Dear Ronnie,

Franny is mad at me, you weren’t supposed to tell her I didn’t want you to give the notes to her.

I don’t know who Luther Burbank was.

You are a great poet tell me more about our future.

I didn’t mean to tell your mom we were going together. I meant ask her if you could have anything to do with them. Like come over, call ‘em, go to boy girl parties or have them to your house.

When you write you leave words out of the sentence and it makes ‘em sound silly.

Do you write the notes in school? Yes, I guess you do, but some of the teachers at our school read them out loud if they catch ‘em.

You better meet me! I have to see you. Could you bring me the picture of you? Or bring it to Franny or Nancy at school if it’s not too big.

I talked to Mary Beth and she said we could meet at her house if we needed to. But do you want to meet me alone or not?

Luv ya,

Debi

This is a crummy pen.

Here’s one I got from my girlfriend:

Your mine until the ocean wears rubber pants too keep his bottom dry.

12/18/68

Dear Ronnie

You never get any of my notes. But I know you can’t help it

We have a faculty game tonite if we have school and I’ll probably have to walk home.

My mom won’t let me go to the movie anyway cause I’m too young. That is with a boy.

I think I’m coming down with the flu. I hope not because I don’t want to be sick over the holidays.

Will I get to see you at all over vacation? You better see me. I have to have a picture of you. Please. I mean one of you now.

We get out at 3:05 Friday. If we have school, I’ll probably go to Westroads with Sherry.

That note Franny spilled grease on that had about Sherry didn’t it? Sherry’s not at all like that. She knows about it & admitted about Marti she went farther than that too! Sherry’s a whole lot different. Does she have a bad reputation at Pius? She sure thinks so. Tell the people she’s not like that ‘K’?

Thanks for the stationary. I can use it.

The rest of this is from the note you never got.

Thanks for being so faithful. You don’t have to be. Cause isn’t girl watching a boys favorade sport?

Laurie L_______ babysat across the street from your house 2 nites and said she babysat your brother too. He said you have lots of girlfriends. You better make it clear you like me.

Heres some posters for you. I’ve got some up on my wall. But it says your name instead of mine. I made a real cool one real big & I have some sayings on it. I want all of my friends to sing it. You especially.

Luv ya,

Debi T_______

(put my last name for kicks)

 Hope your foots O.K.

P.S. Nancy told begged me for you to ask Steve to come over or home from school with you because she has a present too big to take to school.

Jolene wants to know what you think of her. Hope it’s bad.

Dear Ronnie,

Barb isn’t queer! (Ya she is a little & fat too.) Anyway holding her hand was just a joke.

I hate those black & brown shoes. I think they are so ugly. They make your feet look like there about 2 feet long.

I don’t think you should come up. Cause I’m going to be so busy packing & stuff. Besides I have to go to Westroads with Sherry. (My mom & dad get kind of mad, too!)

Talking about evil, the boys in my room throw air planes with pins on them. I take the pins and bend them.

I hope you got some pictures for me.

Nancy sent this up at 10 o’clock with her mom. I have ta go to bed now. Good nite.

Love,

Debi

P.S. We wong won our game today 42-40.

[Note: Maybe Debi wasn't my very, very first girlfriend, and I must have confessed to her spending an afternoon with a gorgeous blonde who, coincidentally, had also moved away to Greater Kansas City.]

8-10-69

Hi,

I was real glad to hear from you. I didn’t know if you’d write or not. Sherry’s writing to Chad so I decided to write you. Oh I didn’t tell you Sherry was here. She came down today and gets to stay for 10 beautiful days. We’ll have so much fun and so many things to talk about. Nancy & Steve broke up but Nancy still likes him or that’s what I heard from Sherry.

Yes I’ve been on vacation. I just got back from St. Louis the day you wrote me. I had alot of fun. Just my dad and I went. I bet you had fun in Florida!

I saw Lynn W_____ at Ward Parkway. She’s twice as fat & not too cute at least I don’t think so at all.

Cool girlfriend huh? I hate her.

She’s a big slut and so know [now] all the adults around here think I’m that way too. God, even you know how goody I am. I’ve changed a lot since I moved. I better. I have so many boyfriends. (Not trying to brag, just stating a true fact.)

Who is Bruce L’s girlfriend?

I know all the people from Morton you met except for Claudia. You really got started off on the right foot when you picked your friends!

I go swimming kinda alot but I don’t have a good tan at all. I’m still working on it.

How good are you on the board doing fancy stuff? I’m pretty good. I learned how to do a front flip and I think I’m pretty good at it even though I don’t know or care what other people think. I learned how to do that on vacation. It was so-o hard to learn. I bet I landed on my back 80 times after about 10 times my back was so numb I couldn’t feel it. Wow! Exciting.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be so-o tired. Sherry & I are going swimming from 12-9. We’ve both got to get a good tan, I could care if I turn black.

There’s this one guy at the pool that is a real babe! Hi is so cute! Only I notice him looking at me constantly and I look at him alot too. But I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me. I just can’t get up enough nerve to say hi. That is unusual for me since I’m about the biggest flirt in the world.

Whose your new girl or don’t ya have one yet?

Is Jeff going to write me or not? If he isn’t have him send me a pic of him.

Oh ya—Thanks alot for your pictures. You look really great in them. I’ll send you a picture of me if you want one but I don’t look like that at all now. My hair is about to my shoulders now and blonde too. I finally talked my mom into letting me put a straightener on it. So about a week ago I put ‘Curl Free’ on it. It worked pretty good. Oh ya its to my shoulders in the front and about 3 inches longer in the back.

Well I’m all out of news.

Write soon.

Luv ya,

Debi

9-28-69

Dear Ronnie,

Hi! Well when I was in town I had so little time to do anything or see anybody, sorry.

I pity you for having Tharpe for art. I hate him so darn bad. Tell Mr. Munson Debi T_______ said hi and if he doesn’t remember me tell him the stripper that moved!

I like about 10 different guys, nobody in particular now anyway.

I am 5′4″ and I weigh about 110 more or less. I think my measurements are 32-24-34, I’m not too sure.

We should get our school pictures back pretty soon so by the next time I write you I’ll send you one.

Here’s the best news there can be for anybody. I tried out for drill team & made it. I’ll tell you all about it. Be prepared, here goes. At our school we have a drill team which consists of 45 girls. They go to all the other junior highs in the district and march and do a dancing routine for them. Its so much fun and you are lucky to be on it. Its a privledge I think. Well anyway we went 4 days and learned a marching routine and dancing routine with pompoms. Then we had the first tryouts last Tuesday and about 250 girls tried out. We had to get out there in front of 7 teachers and do our dance routine in groups of 4 people. It was scarey and I only goofed up once. Only 73 girls made it that day and then on Thursday we had to do the marching routine by ourself in front of the 4 teachers. That was real scary!! I goofed up there too. I was doing it perfect until one part then I glanced up at the teachers and just stopped right there & stood there and I had to start over, then I did pretty good. Thursday nite I actually had myself convinced I didn’t make it. Our whole family never went through so much worry as in these past 2 weeks. I lost about 14 hours of sleep altogether. But anyway Friday when I went to school when I saw I made it I started crying I was so happy.

I’ll tell you more about this in the next letter I’m so tired. I’m going to fall asleep its pretty late.

Love,

Debi

P.S. Please write back within a week. I haven’t had a letter in ages it seems like.

October 26, 1969

Dear Ronnie, (or is it Ron now?)

Hi. I’m going to answer your questions first, okay. All I ever seem to do on Friday and Saturdays and most weekdays is babysit. I make over $40 a month no kidding either. Our football team lost 1 or 2 games only. We have 2 teams for each grade level, A team & B team. We always go to the A team games. We only lost our first and maybe yesterdays game, I’m not sure cuz I had to leave early. But today the Chiefs won 42-22. Yea! Oh, yea, tell good ole Nebraska I’m proud of her beating Oklahoma like she did.

Here’s a pic of me. Hope you like it. I’m sending you a colored & black & white one. Please send the colored one back as soon as possible cuz I have to send it to alot more people. I’m sending your pictures back cuz I want you to sign them & mail them back to me. In your next letter I expect 3 pictures coming back to me.

I can type pretty good too. But my fingernails are so long they always get in my way.

I know who Debbie B______ is, are you going with her yet? I like this guy named Jim V______ and he sure is cute!!! He’s tall too, only 6 ft. Thats quite a change after you, shrimp. He called me Friday nite & I was so happy. Tomorrow nite my girlfriends Catholic religion class is having a party and he is in her class and wants me to come. They are going to show a movie for about 15 minutes. Hope something exciting happens. There’s also a all school party on Halloween. Hope he asks me to it. Phone’s ringing I hope its Jim. Darn, darn darn it was someone else.

Don’t let anybody read the next part of my letter please!! I wish I would have made out with you when I had the chance cuz boy that’s almost all anybody does down here, except me of course. The first time I made out was this summer with a junior, was I scared! You know the real reason I broke up with you, it wasn’t cuz I was moving but that excuse came in handy at the time, it was cuz I was chicken to make out. Please don’t show this letter to anyone. Please!!

I think we get our report cards this Wednesday, maybe not maybe its next Wednesday. Boy is this ever a easy week, Monday (tomorrow) I have to go to that party, Tuesday all the 9th graders get TB tests free, Wednesday I might get to model in the girls school fashion show unless some of the clothes the lady brings me don’t fit right & Wed. nite some girl is going to come out and see me about Job’s daughters. Thursday nothing & Friday the school party.

My writing in this letter is crappy cuz its so small. Believe me its not usually this bad.

Don’t be mad about the first paragraphs on this page but I’m sorry but I thought it might be nice you know.

Tell a__ to write me please.

Our drill team hasn’t done any performance yet. We practice every Monday nite after school.

Write soon & don’t forget to send me all the pictures (3 of them) back.

Love always,

Debi

November 23, 1969

Hi Ron,

Sorry I took so long to write but have I ever been busy! Don’t even have time for myself.

I like your picture. Its good. I like your hair too. It looks really neat.

I’m sure glad you aren’t mad at me. I don’t know why I thought you’d be but anyway I’m glad I told you about it. Hey our anniversary passed a year ago the 18th we started going together. Did you remember? I did!

Our report cards came out. My grades are as follows:

    Science – B

    Clothing  A

    Unified    B

    Typing    A

    Algebra   C

I missed the honor roll by one grade. That stupid Algebra teacher hates me and I hate her!

I don’t like Jim any more. See this kid named Dean F______ wrecked it for me. He’s liked me since May (he lives by me) and he’s tried to get me so many times its pathetic but I’d never like him. So he decided if he can’t have me nobody will and he broke Jim & I up from liking each other because Jim is in his woodshop and Dean talked to him in there. Now this other guy I like now is also in Deans woodshop but nobody knows I like him but my best friend & I. I’ve got to get him to take me to the next dance, its not until December 12 so I have some time to work on him. He’s real cute and also about 6 ft. He’s in my Science class so I can talk to him alot in there when we do experiments.

I can’t wait till Thursday! I’m going to go to the Chiefs football game. It ought to be good since we’re playing Denver. Watch it on T.V.

I sure hope Nebraska wins the Big 8. I was really glad when they beat Kansas. I watched the game on TV. It was a goodie!

My sister and brother say hi. Aren’t you lucky?

Would you please tell Sherry A__ to write me? I haven’t heard from her in ages it seems, not since August.

Better go now. Please write soon.

Love,

Deb

December 8, 1969

Ron,

Thank you soooo much for the necklace. I just love it. I had told about everyone what I wanted was that and then here I get one. Its just darling and thanks a million.

Hows life been treating you? Still looking good I see.

Love,

Debi

Write soon you own me.

Dear Ron,

Hi! How goes it? I’m really sorry I haven’t written and I know you won’t believe me but I actually was going to write you Monday, the day I got your letter. I have been so wrapped up in my 5 activities that I don’t hardly have time for school work. I’ll tell ya my five activities just in case you a curious. Sewing, Drill Team, Jobs Daughters, Babysitting and last but not least BOYS.

How do you like the way the Kansas City Chiefs smeared the Minnesota Vikings? [Super Bowl IV was played January 10, 1970, at Tulane Stadium, New Orleans, and the Chiefs won 23 to 7.]God it was a good game! If you didn’t watch it … well, shame on you. We are the World Champions, NO 1!!!!! Nobody is better than CHIEFS. You couldn’t possibly imagine how happy I was when we won the Super Bowl. But I was even happier when we beat those _______ Oakland Raiders. That quarterback Daryle Lamonica is So-o-o conceited. Their team was so sure they were going to beat us for the AFL title that they actually went out the nite before the game and celebrated. They even had the room in New Orleans all ready. Gosh am I glad we beat them!! I cried too, just a few tears. Back to the Super Bowl. Did you see it? Did you see either game? My gosh was the Super Bowl good!! We had the game all the way. Especially since Jan Stenarud made the filed goal from the 48. My favorate part was when Otis Taylor made that great catch and ran for the touchdown. We were supposedly underdogs in both games. But we went to it and showed ‘em! Yep, I watched part of the Sun Bowl [Nebraska 45-Georgia 6] after the Kansas City game. We were playing New York Jets then. If you can’t tell I love football!!!!

Nope K.C. doesn’t have an underground radio station at least not that I know of.

Didn’t you get my thank you note for your present? If not thanks a million. I love it and wear it practically every other day.

My Christmas was great too! I got 2 pairs of pajamas, (one with feet in them) some Wind Song perfume, a billfold, panty hose, Snoopy dog, book, etc.

I haven’t seen Butch Cassady but I saw Dr. Zchivago. I didn’t really like it that well.

It sure has been almost a year since I moved. In fact it will be the 25. It doesn’t seem like it at all to me! This year (9th grade) has gone so-o-o fast I can’t believe it!!

I’m doing okay with boys. About 6 guys like me but I don’t like any of them. I like a junior that lives clear across the city and goes to North. (I’ll go to South next year.) He likes me too. I only seem to see him once or twice every 5 months. I just saw him last Friday and before that I hadn’t seen him since August. In a way he makes me mad. He tells my friend he’d go with me if he had an I.D. or ring. He can at least go out & buy one.

No, I sure don’t remember Debbie H______. In fact I’ve never even heard of her. Tell me what she looks like or do you have a picture of her? I want to know, so don’t forget.

We’ve played 3 our of our basketball games and won them all so far. I have only been to one of them.

Who do you have for Math? I had Lawyer. Ick. I take Algebra. Ick. Its hard!!!!

You think you’ve been busy. I don’t see how I found time to write. I’m supposed to be doing my homework but don’t tell on me okay?!?

What in the world do you mean you’ve been going once a month? Where? Roller skating. I don’t think I’ve been skating since last July. No kidding.

I usually babysit on Fridays & Saturdays. I have to babysit here this Saturday darn.

I charge 75 cents an hour now. Everyone does now. You should go up.

I just looked over your past letters and saw you had Munson for Study Hall. Tell him hi for me and if he doesn’t remember me tell him “the stripper’! That was his special nickname for me. Sweet isn’t it. Tell me what he says too.

Better go and get my homework done.

Love,

Debi

ba

That was her last letter. Afterward she utterly disappeared from my life. Reviewing all of it now exposes how I had very early established the type of girl and woman who would consistently interest me: spirited yet self-contained, from a good family background, clear about her goals.

The irrepressible Debi must remain at large on the face of the earth. My guess is she curates a photo archive.

I wonder if she still hates the Raiders.

“It is not always through sublime persons that great things come into human life.” – H.G. Wells

Even though I no longer consider myself a member of the Mormon church, having improvised my exit strategy around the bachelor’s perpetual delight in frolicking with his lady friends, an incident stays with me that occurred during my mission of many years ago, before standards were tightened up. But before the story of this service I must briefly relate my conversion. It happened offhandedly, which was the problem. Having migrated to Los Angeles after completing a university degree in my native Wyoming, I found the approach of two lovelies to my apartment’s door—sister missionaries, they were called—to be a welcome diversion in my lonely life. The sisters hadn’t arrived here entirely by chance, as I had read some of the church’s literature and permitted a Mormon coworker at the studio to throw my name into the great hopper of prospects that must have been maintained in Salt Lake City. I wouldn’t say I was ripe for the picking but might have been ready to be harvested with ripening to occur on the way to market. Of the two emissaries who were sent, one, Sister Belknap, was exactly the right sort of person to convey the Gospel of the Lord. She was herself a divine, if overly coiffed, creature whose words rang home with particular force whenever she crossed her legs and witnessed to me with her elegant, attenuated calf. Sometimes she absently jounced the suspended foot to a heavenly inner rhythm, and as we sat close together in the tight conversational grouping I had purposefully arranged, she unknowingly drummed my shin. Her partner, Sister Logan—a curiosity in that she came not from Utah but from Oklahoma—made up in wit what she lacked in pulchritude and provided the excellent complement to Sister Belknap’s blessed exuberance.

My baptism occurred within days, with the unforeseeable result that the sister missionaries were almost immediately transferred to Van Nuys, departing from my immediate realm as fast as the jump plane from a paratrooper. Soon after I landed on my own feet, the bishop summoned me to his office at the ward house. He was not the usual sort of hale, blond, backslapping Mormon but instead a man of Latin ethnicity, name of Azevinho (I would later learn he went by Buddy), and serious aspect who knit his brows together and twitched his fine nose and pinched his moist umber lips between his teeth. I had heard he made a nice living composing scores for film and television, and people spoke of him reverentially, as though he were truly an inspired man. However, his concerns about me were rather temporal.

“Tell me when you were baptized,” he said after we shook hands and seated ourselves in his bland office.

“I was baptized—surely you heard the coyotes howling on the hillside—last Sunday afternoon.”

“I imagine you mean angels singing. Anyway, congratulations on that. We’re pleased to add you to our ward. I understand you’re a writer for Johnny Carson.”

“It’s my career ambition,” I said, “but until then I’m just a props guy who slips sheets of jokes under Johnny’s door.”

“Still, that’s very impressive, considering that you’ve recently come here from South Dakota.”

“I’m actually from Wyoming.”

“Yes, the Plains. Anyway, perhaps you’ll have some literary output left over for the pageants we put on right here in the ward. Now, before we go any farther, I’m afraid there’s something I must bring up with you. This is often regarded as unsavory, but for the sake of the sisterhood, I’m obligated.”

I wondered if I had violated a dress code or was exuding a musky scent. Instead, Bishop Azevinho asked, “Do you masturbate?”

The truest answer I could have given him was, “And how!” For a young and virile guy like me, masturbation was but the trumpets on the vine, the leaves on the tree. However, now was not the time for levity but for gravity. The Bish inconveniently peered into my face, expecting me to maintain eye contact when the maintenance I would have preferred was assessing the flecks in the floor tiles, looking for waxy streaks. It struck me that I had never given a second thought to my self-amusement, not until now when it was as if a seventy-five-page indictment had been unsealed in federal court. This is the moment when I realized they really meant it about chastity—I had read something about it somewhere—and probably about all those other deleterious activities that were purportedly to be avoided. Now it was also implied that I would not be frolicking among the sisterhood as I had unwittingly assumed. Maybe this chain of revelation could be taken as my first prompting of the Spirit. I tried to hide my dismay.

“You’ll have to stop that activity,” Bishop Azevinho said, pointing his index finger at me as if I hadn’t been implicated strongly enough.

“I’ll endeavor to stop.”

“You will stop!”

“I will stop.”

“Good.”

“Maybe a twelve-step program exists, or a series of cassette tapes.”

His glare made it evident this was no time for foolery. “There’s something else I’d like you to consider,” he said, and went on to extol the advantages of serving as a missionary for the church. Not only would it be an excellent way of winning control over myself but also of commanding a powerful message that would change the lives of the people I met. The world was just beginning to open to the Gospel. And I would be richly rewarded. It wouldn’t be too much for me, at this stage of my career, to furlough my ambitions; Johnny Carson would still be cracking jokes a couple of years hence, at which time, having gained additional substance and seasoning through my fieldwork, I would be even better prepared to write them. And something in his eyes intimated that after my successful period of self-denial and service had ended, the Lord would be presenting me with the fairest of all the sisters; in no time at all, I’d be happily married and copulating. 

ab

So that’s how I found myself mired in a Swedish provincial city in which, even on a July afternoon if it happened to be chilly and rainy, the gloom and desolation could be overpowering and the only other sound besides spattering drops might be the clacking of a sole woman’s wooden clogs on the cobbles. In the relatively short time since my baptism I had learned, during rigorous missionary training in Salt Lake, at least the rudiments of the Swedish language and was able to recite the lessons my partner and I were to present to persons who are so blithely called “investigators”—the intrepid seekers whom the church intrigues. Likewise perfecting the role, I had clothed myself in a white shirt and quiet blue tie under a baggy navy suit, in the Mormon tradition of dressing like agents of the U.S. government: mostly taxmen or FBI. Also in this same time of preparation, I had achieved sufficient self-mastery to have satisfied even the dourest bishop.

My senior partner, my guide through this gloom, Elder Carson P. Dobbs, brought me home from the train station and opened up the little third-floor apartment we were to share. Elder Dobbs was about five and a half feet tall, prematurely balding, and owning a nose that looked as if it had endured a spell of asteroid bombardment. We were going to share sleeping quarters, he had already informed me—bunk beds, to be more exact—and I was desperately worried he would turn out to be a snorer. Besides all that, though, something about the way he toddled along did very little to inspire confidence as to his enthusiastic leadership. And the same held true for his attitude. When I expressed curiosity about his language proficiency, he told me not to worry about it because everybody in Sweden spoke English and they were more than happy to practice with an American; rarely was there need of speaking Swedish. In fact, he said, tintinnabulation in his voice, he probably knew less of it now than when he began his mission a year ago.

“What about prospects?” I demanded. “Are you teaching a lot of them? I was warned not to expect mass baptisms in the river or anything like that, but I hope there’s a little activity.”

“Nah, not much happenin’,” he said. “In fact, I’d be surprised if you have anybody to teach at all. I spend more time back here during the day than I should. Not that the mission president or zone leaders would be happy to know it. But what do they expect, stationing us in a place like this?”

“I suppose there’s lots of time for scripture study.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

He flopped onto the lower bunk and kicked off his wing-tip shoes. The place was compact, pocket-sized, a snug little den: one room with a rudimentary kitchenette and a bathroom that made me realize how and quite possibly where the term “water closet” had originated. The main chamber of the apartment, which offered but one window, was additionally furnished with two side chairs, a chest of drawers, and a desk with a stool. This is where we were supposed to rise early, say our prayers, study our scriptures, suit up, and feed ourselves. On Monday, our personal day, we would lounge around here in blue jeans if we wanted, or even pajamas, and write letters to our folks and other well-wishers. It was not so much a home as a dank receptacle, but it would do for a spell.
The next morning’s alarm initiated the clamor that was Elder Dobbs’s foray into the bathroom, knowing as he did precisely how long the hot water would hold out. Whether to call him long- or short-winded, I can’t say, but “windy” certainly applied, and there followed three flushes, as though he had considered the distance to the cafeteria. After twenty minutes he emerged clean-shaven and florid, not to mention naked. He was rather a pudgy fellow with a hairy chest and belly. I waited until he edged past the bedstead and began to dress, at which moment I shot into the bathroom and started devising a routine for myself, learning how to navigate the small space without toppling backward into the toilet, a routine worthy of Houdini. Ah, there was an inspiration! If Houdini could break the chains that bound him and escape a safe at the bottom of a tank of water, I could shower, shave, and brush in this tiny booth of a bathroom without getting fractured or even bruised.

On our first two days together we spent just a couple of hours knocking on doors before knocking off for the day. Tracting was “a flippin’ waste,” Elder Dobbs said, whereas I would have called it unremunerative. He read a bit in the afternoons before having a long nap. I sat on the stool at the desk and wrote in my journal, occasionally thumbing through my scriptures. It was still impossible to know whether he was right about speaking English over Swedish, as hardly a door had been opened up: it was as though the city was barricaded against us, and we went mutely about, as much mimes as missionaries. But in the evenings—most likely because he knew it would save his having to cook—we went to visit members who put out smörgås for us. Cold cuts are fine, but I began to hope for a hot meal by Sunday. As it happened, Sunday was my favorite and least favorite day of the week, because in the local branch of the church the members were hardly more experienced than I at actually being Mormon; so it was up to us, the elders, to lead in many ways; my weekday practice at miming proved a useful starting point, the antidote to otherwise just milling about. Nevertheless, I did enjoy seeing the members in action and learning more about them.

The first two and a half weeks unfolded according to this routine, and I was pleased that Elder Dobbs seemed to have accepted me. We were meshing well, I thought. He laughed at my quips and was interested to hear about my life. Although he came from a farm in central Utah, he intended to move to L.A. after his mission and study landscape design. For my part, while I didn’t dislike him, I found myself less responsive. At the end of a large meal, on the rare occasion when we had one, he liked to ask, “Now, how would you like a fried egg?” Such an interrogative would evidently produce hysterical peals back in the wilds of Utah. Maybe it was merely an effect of the hushed environs of Sweden that I failed to do more than smirk.

That he liked me well, indeed, soon became apparent. It was only a few nights later that I awoke to find the bunk bed swaying. Elder Dobbs was climbing the ladder with all the assurance of a telephone lineman. He was of a mind to invade my top bunk. I had just been awakened from a dream about searching for my golf ball in the rough, and from this mental point, quite a distance—a good blast with a five-iron—needed to be spanned to comprehend the reality of my senior partner’s intentions. I finally did—and could tell it was urgent—when he flopped down beside me. I still hadn’t moved but now began to wriggle a bit.

“It’s not what you think it is,” he averred, a dampish zephyr passing over his lips and billowing against my face.

“I think it’s the love that dare not speak its name.”

“Just relax. All I need’s to hold you.”

“I’m going to count to five, but when I reach four, if you’re still here, you’ll go flying onto the floor.”

“Please, just a half hour like this.”

“A half hour? One—”

“Don’t make a big fuss. How do you know you won’t like it?”

I didn’t reach two in the countdown but instead thrust my fist into his soft belly, which caused him to erupt like a balloon, spraying droplets of saliva into my face and shoulders before writhing away from me and assuming the fetal position. His reaction was more exaggerated than merited by the punch, which was more of a chip shot, if we’re to stick with the golf lingo. He began to moan and sough like a Chinook descending onto the Plains. I sat up and threw off the covers. Not that I was livid or incensed—I had received the attentions of men before; it didn’t destroy my self image—but my voice did betray something short of ecstasy.

“Not interested—do you hear me?” I half-twisted around to address him, putting my hand on his shoulder. “So we’re going to make a deal. You and I aren’t destined to be sweethearts. And in return, I won’t say anything about the little interlude we’ve just had, not to the mission president or the zone leadership, and certainly no letter to the Dobbs clan in Utah, where your older brothers, male cousins, and grizzled mountain-man uncles would cage you with a cougar if you ever returned there.”

“I wasn’t going to rape you.”

“Among many other things, no, you weren’t.” I vaulted off the end of the bed, executing a half-twist and reverse pike. At least I think it was a reverse pike: at any rate, an impressive dismount. “How did you end up as a missionary, anyway?”

“O-o-o-o-h-h-h,” he said, a little ominously. “Sometimes you don’t tell everything. And other times there are unasked questions. They just wave you through the checkpoint.”

“I don’t see how you’re going to make it to the end of your mission. You still have a long time to go.”

“Leave that to me. Or maybe I’ll just have to go native.” He was able to sit up now and undertook to let himself down to the floor. Somehow it was like watching fiberglass insulation unroll. The guy was completely lacking in crispness. He turned and looked at me, anguished and obviously pleading. If his dark brown eyes had begun to swirl like a cartoon character’s, it wouldn’t have surprised me. He said, “You’ll just have to cover for me sometimes. ‘Elder Dobbs wasn’t feeling so great today. Sleeping sickness. He must have been bitten by a rabid mosquito.’ That’s what you can tell the zone and the branch president and the members.”

“Dogs are rabid, not mosquitoes.”

“Doesn’t matter. Swedes always act like they understand English, but little things like that get by them. You could say venomous if you want.”

“Bilious. A bilious mosquito. That’ll throw just about all of them.”

Before the attempted seduction, he hadn’t bothered to change out of his sacred garments, but now he went over to the dresser and stripped out of them, then dressed in regular briefs and his P-day outfit of jeans and a gold polo shirt and the same wing-tips. He got a light jacket from the rack by the entryway, and then he opened the door. “Don’t sweat it if you haven’t heard from me for a while. I have to find out what’s out there. I’ll be back Sunday morning in time for church.”

After the door clicked behind him, I thought of many things: whether he shouldn’t have taken a change of clothes and his toothbrush, for example, the neglect of which struck me as curious. I also started to plan a plausible response in case a member of the church spotted me alone in the street, and how to fib and mislead in the daily report to the zone, a call which I would be making for the, Elder Dobbs, unwell with encephalitis. As far as activities at the branch, not much was planned between now and Sunday but on Friday evening some of the youth would be rehearsing a skit. I would just have to lock and unlock the building for them and act as though nothing was amiss.

 ab

 I’ve always been an independent sort of guy. At the age of nineteen, owning my first motorcycle, I took a solo trip around Wyoming, to see it for myself, and came home to Cheyenne burned by wind and sun, characterizing what I’d seen as “quasi-lunar.” I’ve always been fearless when it comes to motorcycles and forthright with verbal descriptions, although less obviously so than the men who named the Grand Tetons. Of course, no one understood me well, but I was used to it and went ahead saying it my way until the day I cleared out for Los Angeles.

Just this sort of experience served me well in my Swedish town of Skövde, which is unpronounceable for the English speaker (a Swede whips up a small cyclone in order to say it in his language). Skövde is a city known for making automobile transmissions. Finding myself ensam, as they say, which is single, or alone, I decided that, just because Elder Dobbs was spinning around on the stool at the gay bar, there was no reason I shouldn’t go ahead with my mission. Then, rather looking forward to the perils that might confront me, I went out to knock on doors. The day was beautiful and sunny with a deep azure sky and the perfume of window box petunias. There was an apartment building I had marked out before and I went right to it, buzzing the units and daring to speak my rough Swedish. The two first-floor occupants politely dismissed me. One second-floor dweller wasn’t home, and the other clicked off. As yet unaccustomed to rejection, I had to gather myself before buzzing 3A. Hearing a woman’s voice without quite understanding it, I unfurled my basic speech, declaring myself to be a missionary for the Kirke av den Siste Dager Helige who would like to talk with her about our church. Again she spoke so quickly that the response got by, but the door buzzed and I grabbed the knob, taking the steps two at a time and arriving winded at her battered brown door. To my knock, she merely said, “Kom in,” which was plain enough, and I stepped into a fine place and encountered a woman in her mid-twenties who wore her bathrobe, white with pink dots, and a pair of gray-and-white bunny-rabbit slippers. She had the tremendous, broad Nordic cheekbones that made her face almost dishlike, and the azure eyes glimmered. Dangling near what appeared to be an infinitely diverting bosom was the silver figure of none other than that Anasazi merry-maker, Kokopelli.

I thanked her for admitting me:“Tak så mycket—”

“You speak English, obviously—an American,” she said, seeming delighted and inviting me to sit on her sofa, which was of uncompromisingly modern design and offered wafer-thin cushions. Of course I sat, putting my scriptures on my lap. “Please excuse the mess here in the room, but my boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—recently moved out and I still haven’t gotten organized.”

“I’m here to tell you about my church, but first I have to say that those slippers are adorable.”

She lifted the right one off the floor, peered at it, and wiggled her toes inside so the rabbit ears twitched. Then she stood straight and tall. “If you have some papers or something, please, go ahead and leave them.”

“There’s also this book, which was specially revealed to the prophet and founder of our church. By the way, I’m Elder Cody. The ‘Elder’ part is a title we use in the church, sort of like ‘Brother.’”

“And is Cody your first or last name?”

“Elder D.J. Cody.”

“Ah. Initials. It’s not common in Sweden, but I’ve heard of other Americans doing this. Well, my name is Karla Mårtinsson. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She pulled a hairbrush out of her pocket and began to stroke it through her endless cascade of blonde hair.

I said, “Likewise,” which she didn’t understand until I approximately translated, saying, “Likaså.” She acknowledged me by noisily dragging in air across her front teeth—a very Swedish trait, I would learn—while continuing with her brushing. I began to recite my speech. This went on for some time, and I had to concentrate hard, fervently wishing it was something I could’ve delivered automatically, through the medulla oblongata, as it were, freeing my forebrain for the purpose of appreciating the beauty before me. After a while she stopped brushing and sat nearby on the sofa, looking at me while pulling hairs from the bristles. When I had finished my spiel, all the while avoiding any mention of the fact that I was supposed to be here with a partner, she said, “I think that’s an interesting story. I didn’t know any of it. Where in America are you from, Elder D.J.?”

“I live in Los Angeles.”

“California. I’ve always wanted to go there and see the palm trees and the beach. This necklace was a gift from an aunt who once went to New Mexico and Arizona.” She scooped it in her hand and displayed it.

“Do you know who Kokopelli is, exactly?”

“Well, yes, sort of. He’s a fertility figure, I believe.”

It seemed best not to elaborate, but I couldn’t help shrugging in a generally positive way.

Now she asked me to excuse her because she was getting ready for work; I could go right on if I had anything else to say. Yes, there was always more material, so I resumed, this time a bit louder after she disappeared into the bedroom. I was somewhere in the plan of salvation—the atonement, I think—when she reemerged from the bedroom holding a neatly folded blouse on top of a skirt with both hands; she had shed the robe and wore only a pair of bright pink panties. My lecture and breathing stopped at once. No doubt my face registered the vacancy of one who has struck a low-hanging pipe. The room shrank. The only thought in my brain was that all this was Elder Dobbs’s fault, but it passed as my senses—sight being the most essential now—filed back in and took their seats in the choir. Karla was speaking.

“I went to the state church several times as a girl. We studied the Bible. I always thought it was so rich.” Her upper lip delicately crinkled on the last word. “I had no idea there were other sacred Christian writings. Won’t you please go on while I dress?”

In preparation before leaving for Sweden, there indeed been a warning that standards of modesty, even between the sexes, were different here, but as it turns out, this is like being warned that Wyoming is a bit windier than most states and then finding out the gales will blow you right out of your unzipped jacket. I stirred through my scriptures and supplies and found a Mormons Bok. Holding it up I said she could have it—I would be happy to leave it. I desperately tried to avoid gawking, gaping, or leering at her splendid breasts. She accepted the book, taking it from me and adding it to her clothes, meanwhile nodding in serene acknowledgement. She walked over to the kitchen, where she set everything on the counter, filled a glass with water, and washed down the white tablet she had taken from a round dispenser. I rallied myself one more time and continued speaking. She finished dressing right there. As it turned out a bra was sandwiched between the blouse and skirt, and she fitted herself into it; and of course, coming from where I do, it was impossible not to think of the roundup of wild mares.

“Shall we go out together?” She came over to me on the sofa. I gathered all my supplies. It would be necessary to go into a café, order a 7Up, and reassemble everything, including me. When I rose, she took my arm. “I’m really sorry to run away like this. But I have to do my job.”

At the door she stepped into a pair of wooden clogs.

“If you’d be interested in attending our church on Sunday, I’d be happy to come for you.”

“I think that could be a good thing,” she said.

With her consent, I offered a brief prayer, an excruciatingly difficult thing to do under the circumstances, but exemplary of the Mormon way. Finally, we started down the stairs together, once again arm in arm. 

ab

 I knew I had done a terrible thing, committed a violation of the two-by-two principle of the Mormon missionary undertaking, and like any violator, I set about to cover up my transgression. Without a partner or any direct supervision here in the desolation of Skövde, the cover-up was easily implemented and flawlessly enacted till the Sabbath. I would just lie low, hang around the apartment, make the daily mumbled phone call to the zone leadership and fib and dissimulate, as required; any additional going about on my own would raise too many questions. Elder Dobbs could have been reported missing, but I was unready to do that, for I was about to bag a trophy on my first hunt. Sunday morning I would circle around Karla’s building, bringing myself up to operating temperature and steadying my hands. Then I would take her to the Skövde branch—for a chapel, the members had some first-floor space in a commercial building not far from her place—displaying her for everyone to admire. Should she follow up her initial interest and decide to be baptized, all the more impressive! As for my departure from protocol, I seriously doubted whether any of the branch members were experienced or savvy enough to understand how grievous it really was.

It seemed safe to assume I wouldn’t see Elder Dobbs before Sunday. And as he knew when walking out, I would have no intention of reporting him missing. It was very unlikely that he hadn’t already engaged in some proscribed activity elsewhere in town, or at his previous posting—maybe he had hopped onto a train—and that he knew where to take refuge. Despite his apparent fecklessness, I had no doubt he was quite capable of living off the land, wherever he was.

Aside from Elder Dobbs, though, there were two other worries. For one thing, I debated whether to confirm beforehand, say, Saturday afternoon, whether Karla still planned to attend the meeting or just to show up at her door on Sunday at the appointed hour. I tormented myself, unable determine a precedent, and paralysis set in. My stomach churned and I gnawed the skin inside my lips. Not for the last time, it seemed an inappropriate issue to raise in prayer with Heavenly Father. It was doubtful that He wanted to hear a buccaneer’s plight. “Oh, dear Lord, I have commandeered this galleon and all the treasure in its hold, which is treasure unto thee. But now my mind overflows with questions. What if my faulty navigation should steer the treasure onto a reef or into the doldrums?” Hard to imagine He wouldn’t have me walking the plank. 

ab

 My second worry concerned the planking, so to speak, that had gone in since my happy encounter with The Next Swedish Mormon. There seemed something dishonorable about it. How depraved that I should be getting a woody all morning, noon, and midnatt, raising the salute to my lovely, trustful investigator. I wanted her to be my first baptism, to cradle her respectfully as I dipped her into the font and not to jab her in the hip or back with the underwater interloper. Yet my mind was becoming a national wetland of carnality. She had mentioned the boyfriend’s moving out. One ideal baptism scenario had already been produced inside my head, but my groin was independently producing a whole series of lurid vignettes that I had to prevent from going into general release by keeping my hands off. But this didn’t forestall my occasional rubbing against the wall, as though one were attempting to use the sole of one’s shoe to scrape a clinging marsupial from one’s ankle. The longer I resisted, the more it felt as though my testicles were calcifying, which was excruciating; but I exhorted myself that by enduring, I would ultimately be entitled to something great.

Had Sisters Belknap and/or Logan experienced a comparable, feminine reaction to me? Women have always struck me as innocent until proven insatiable. Surely, within the cross-section of worthy Mormon ladies drawn to serve the Lord in the mission field, the number of lusty babes and adventurous strumpets would be strictly minimized: they’re the anise seeds trying to pass through the flour sifter. But the inner workings of even a sister missionary’s mind, not to mention her overt actions, may remain invisible until the exception—coming home early after starting to show at three and a half months—proves the rule. As long as this line of thinking persisted in my mind, I had to wonder about the lovely Karla Mårtinsson herself, that Kokopelli figure bumping all day against her breastbone. Dare I suspect my suit and tie and neatly combed hair might even momentarily have altered the pattern of electron flow inside her brain? Assuming disinterest on the female’s part has often been the injudicious mistake of this stag.

The solution to my planking problem as presented by social tradition was the cold shower, a barbaric practice that I avoided in this civilized country. The other side of the coin was to go for a mile run, but the sight of a Mormon missionary loping over the cobbles might well have caused the smattering of Swedes in the streets to call the police, if not to chase and tackle me themselves. The other alternative, recommended by church officials, was to get down on my knees and pray, but I already was far out of bounds after going solo, and now there was this unusual issue. If I’d liked the sound of my own voice, I at least might have sung a hymn.

It’s strange to report that I finally settled myself by picturing the Christmas tree Elder Dobbs had described to me in one of our conversations. It was among the first things he had divulged, lowering his voice a bit as if someone might steal the idea and apply for a patent. He had once captured a large tumbleweed, taken it home, erected it in a block of florist’s foam, and had a heyday hanging ornaments and adding tinsel before topping the masterpiece with an angel. It was said to surpass any fir or spruce, and certainly any artificial tree, and provided a Christmas like no other. 

ab

I decided to go by Karla’s apartment on Saturday evening for a reminder and progress check. The truth was that my yearning for her, just to glimpse her again, to see her hair shimmer like a brimming harvest wagon, to watch Kokopelli cavort between her clavicles, to hear her delicately chiming voice, made staying away impossible. I skulked over to her building, using the alleyways and shadowy side of the street. She sounded delighted to hear from me and buzzed me in. When she opened the door this time, there was no locker-room intimacy; she wore a pair of blue jeans and a short-sleeved embroidered chambray blouse and white sneakers. Her quarter-hectare smile eased all my worries about intruding.
“What a fine surprise! Please come in.”

“You’re so nice to give me such a welcome.”

“Not at all—it’s wonderful to see you.”

In the living room she was in the process of sanding an antique chair, and there were some refinishing supplies on the coffee table. I also noticed nearby the copy of Mormons Bok, and protruding from it was a gaggle of little white page markers. I was impressed with her assiduity.

“So you’re in the furniture business?”

“I’m just doing this for my parents. Their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary is coming up.”

“Well, then, better that you give them a chair than a car, I guess.” It was a stupid thing to say, but she caught my intent to create some delightful repartee and agreed that restoring a car would be too much labor. Just the typical Scandinavian woman, it seemed, ever-poised and finding the delight and humor in everything. She went into the kitchen to fetch apple-cinnamon tea and packaged cookies. Instead of sitting on the sofa, I grabbed her scriptures and followed. The kitchen, nearly the size of my apartment’s main room, had a small table with two chairs. I pulled one out and sat. Accepting the snack from her, I couldn’t help smiling just as sweetly, it seemed certain, as she had earlier.

“Varsågod,” she welcomed, waving her hand and returning the smile.

“Tusen tak,” I thanked her a thousand times. “So I see you’ve done a lot of reading. You probably have many questions. Maybe I’m not the best scripture man, but there’s plenty of authoritative help available. How did you find it, though—I mean, quite generally?”

“Your church has an amazing story. I had no idea at all. I’m very eager to go with you tomorrow and meet the believers.”

“They’re people who live lives of sacrifice and self-mastery, with great rewards now and even greater ones awaiting in the next life.” I was going to tell her about the Celestial Kingdom but became distracted by the magnificent rustle her body made inside the chambray blouse. I found myself staring at the embroidery, which might have been a Laplander motif. Kokopelli was retired for now; she wore no jewelry—it would have impeded her work—but she needed little ornamentation, or only the simplest: even a wreath of pine cones and a necklace of braided birch bark would have looked terrific on her.

“Would you like to hear some music?” she asked.

“Are you going to sing to me?”

“No,” she laughed.

“Play the violin?”

“No, some recordings. What do you like?”

It was going to kill me to tell her missionaries weren’t supposed to listen to music, so I merely said anything would be fine.

“How about some Swedish music? I’ve been listening to old folk songs.” She hurried into the other room and clattered through a bunch of cassettes, one of which she fed into the player before returning to sit with me. There was a votive candle on the table and she lit it.

“The tea is excellent, like liquid candy,” I said. “Thank you so much for everything.”

“You already said that, thousands of times.” She laughed at her own exaggeration. “You don’t need to repeat it. Besides, it’s nothing.”

For a time we merely sat and listened and sometimes looked right into each others’ eyes. I have to admit that I found the keening voices and shrill fiddling to be more unsettling than anything, and would have preferred something familiar.

“What is this man singing about?” I asked.

“He’s singing about how good the summer sun is to Sweden. It’s one of the merriest old songs.” She rose and collected the cups and saucers, putting everything by the sink. It was insidiously cheap of me, but I couldn’t help stealing a look at her perfection. She almost caught me when she turned suddenly, asking, “Would you like me to teach you a folk dance?”

What else was there to do? I had already derailed. How could this possibly make any difference? “I’m really not supposed to dance,” I protested.

“Of course not, but you’re in Sweden. Most other things that people aren’t supposed to do are permitted here. And besides, I’ll never tell.”

For the first time on my mission, I felt like the clumsy guy from WHY-Oh-Ho!-Ming. I took her hands, looked into her eyes, and followed her steps. But soon I was the cool California dude again and could lead the dance, and then pick up the variations she showed me. After the mission president found out what sort of cultural tidbits I’d acquired, I would probably be on my way home, possibly traveling hand over hand via the Transatlantic Cable. But her warmth and softness and the gleam in her eyes, not to mention the indulgent Swedish summer sun’s radiance, kept me going, and by the end of the long tape, having enacted the music, I no longer found it screechy or shrill.

When she didn’t put in another tape, I knew it was time to go.

“You’re an excellent dancer,” she said.

“You’re an excellent teacher—and dancer. Very graceful.”

“Thank you so much.” She bowed slightly. Then we were embracing each other ever so delicately and there was a corresponding, fragile kiss, her lips as soft and warm as a California jasmine breeze.

“Please don’t tell about that, either,” I said.

She merely beamed at me, a look that suggested it wouldn’t be the only secret kiss of her lifetime.

“I’ll come for you at halv nio,” I said—eight thirty—and asked if she could indeed be ready; it wasn’t necessary to dress too well but neither too poorly. She nodded, still beaming at me and gleaming back at the sun, and I nodded to in return, a million unspoken words losing purchase inside my head like rocks and boulders on an unstable cliff..

“Godnatt, J.D.,” she said. “What a pleasure it’s been.” 

ab

When I got back to the apartment, Elder Dobbs was just sitting down with a plate of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. He looked worn and needed a shave. He was dressed in a light-blue polo shirt and jeans with boat shoes, which must all have been new purchases.
“Nothing like home cookin’,” I said.

“You can say that again,” he asserted through a tremendous mouthful. “I’ve been living on knäckebröd and creamed herring, and you lose your taste for that in a hurry. Flip”—his Utah expression destroyed me every time he used it—”these eggs taste unbelievable.”

I sat across from him at the table. “I guess you didn’t make anything for me.”

He gestured to the pan still on the stove and grunted, taking another bite and dangling a slice of potato on his lower lip. “Help yourself.”

“I got an investigator while you were gone. Speaking of unbelievable—she really is. She’s coming to church tomorrow. I figured what the heck, even if you weren’t here, it shouldn’t stop me from going about my business. She doesn’t know anything about partners or any of that.”

“You’re right, it shouldn’t make any difference. I’ll go along in the morning when you pick her up.”

As soon as he finished dining, Elder Dobbs stashed his plate on the drainboard by the sink and began to get ready for bed. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet but he got into his garments and pajamas, knelt and said his prayers, and tumbled into his bunk. I had been making myself some eggs, but before he went to sleep, which would be presently—he always fell quickly to sleep and rarely woke—I remembered to notify him that I had told no one about his absence, which caused him to grunt twice before he rolled over to face the wall.

In the morning we went by Karla’s, and I introduced her to Elder Dobbs, explaining that we had worked separately last week. He accepted her hand and lightly shook it. She looked magnificent in a rich blue dress with pearl-white pumps and a matching bag, and her hair was pinned back with gold bars. She expressed nervousness but looked and acted serene enough, and the ten-minute walk to the building where the Skövde branch was located probably did all of us good as far as calming down. One of the sisters was playing hymns on the piano when we arrived, and it sounded like stovebolts hitting sheet iron. We introduced Karla to various members, and then sat with her during sacrament meeting. As the sacrament was passed around I focused on the light blonde froth covering her arm. I crossed and uncrossed my legs several times. When it was time for the talks, the speakers went on at painful length and I ended up staring at the walls, the ceiling. Finally, we relinquished her to the Relief Society for their meeting. It was part-way through our own priesthood session that Elder Dobbs and I were called to the small office. We both supposed it had to do with clerical or bookkeeping minutiae: the missionaries often helped out with this in the Shövde branch. Instead, much to our surprise, we found President Smith, our boss in Sweden mission, who had to have come all the way over on this morning’s train from Stockholm. His thin face was creased with distress and his tremendous mane of blond hair had been whitening by the minute. He wasted no time in informing us that news of Elder Dobbs’s desertion, as well as my dissembling, had reached him, and Dobbs would be going home to the states. This deportation would be effective immediately. There was a night flight out of Arlanda airport. As for me, I was to return to Stockholm with President Smith and would be reassigned. New missionaries would come to Skövde this next week. We were to go immediately to our apartment and collect our things.

By now the branch members had divided up into their small classes for even more instruction, and I knew where to find Karla with the Investigators, meeting in a tiny cluster at the back of the chapel room with a branch member filling in for the missionaries as discussion leader. Karla looked as if she were having a fine time. I merely went right up to her on her folding chair and dragged my index finger across her back, from shoulder to shoulder. Then I said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m being transferred back to Stockholm—leaving right now.” I watched her press lips together and thought I saw her eyes dim ever so slightly. “It was such a pleasure to meet you.” I bent very close and whispered, “Last night was wonderful.”

“Yes, it was for me, as well,” she murmured.

Elder Dobbs and I had a solemn return to Stockholm with President Smith on the afternoon train. I couldn’t help imagining Kokopelli as the locomotive engineer. I hoped this train stayed on the tracks. It was killing me to ask how Smith had found out about Dobbs’s going AWOL, but I kept my mouth shut. The answer was something I never would learn. We put Dobbs on the late flight and then I crashed in the mission home’s extra room. The next day, severely chastened about my complicity and warned against any repetition or even the slightest deviation from regulations, I was assigned a new partner right in central Stockholm, a dour experienced Canadian named Elder Tad George. It was a so-so partnership but we got lots of work done and definitely didn’t dwell on any preoccupations. I managed not to think more than three or four dozen times of Karla Mårtinsson until word reached me a few months later that she had, indeed, gone ahead and accepted the Gospel. How I envied the elder who got to hold her while she was immersed in baptism.

I continued to practice the faith for several years after returning to California and beginning to write, as it happened, for game shows, but then I backslid into my old depravities and at present am something of a bon vivant. Those Swedes who looked up to me during my mission, and other faithful members of the church in general, might not welcome this ambiguous report, but I do selectively remain a believer—I like the mystical elements of Mormonism—and certainly regard my mission as a personal success. As for Karla, we are not in contact. When I think of her, surprisingly enough, the image I retain isn’t her prancing around in panties: I recall all her brilliance and vitality being directed to sanding down an antique chair for refinishing. And I always remember her saying nothing was too regular in Sweden.