CHAPTER 1
Visions
A Long Long Time Ago. Especially July 7, 1975.
When you were a Mormon boy there was only a good mission dream, with no unreachable stars in sight.
It started with dreamy songs I yelled out at church about going on a mission and converting people who really wanted to know the truth. It got stronger with all the dreamy talk I heard at church too — the best thing you'll ever do, you'll never be so happy, wish I was out there again. And it took on some real Plato-style form when I finally stopped goofing around in the pews during services and started listening to the legions of missionaries who came marching home after two long years away, telling their dreamy tales.
Before my star-filled eyes the dream became flesh, as one returning missionary hero after the next grabbed for dear life onto the remote-controlled height-adjusting pulpit and white-knuckledly told another epic tale of adventure and conversion. Lots of conversion. By the time the hero neared the end of his story, which he signaled by saying a few spine-shivering sentences in the exotic new language he'd learned, the pulpit was on fire, and so were my insides, because I so badly wanted to be just the sort of guy I was sure these guys actually were.
A guy like these wasn't just a regular guy, or even one of the regular missionaries you saw working around town, but a haloed revelation. Oh, the missionaries working around town glowed pretty nicely too, sure they did, but they were still works in progress, illuminatively speaking: you didn't know what they were like before their mission, and you probably wouldn't see them again after they went home. But for the guys who left on faraway missions from your hometown and then came back you saw the before and the after picture, and the difference was like firefly and sun, night and day, oil and water, bond and free, Dodger and Giant. Seeing the after version was like seeing Koufax pitch, or Tammy Carr walking into sixth grade, or Saint John himself striding onto Patmos.
Can you believe how mature he is now?(!) head-shaking people would ask. Can you believe that language he learned, whatever the heck it was?(!) Did you hear him stumble around in English?(!) What a missionary he must have been if he can hardly remember English!(!) And what about those miracle stories?(!) I wanted to do miracles too, and make converts, and get the gift of tongues, and be mature, and become a spiritual giant, like these guys, and have people say things about me with implied and even explicit exclamation points.
The vision big-bangingly ended with me coming triumphantly home to tell my own miracle and conversion stories from my most assured record-setting mission, and wowing everyone with my own exotic new language, and most of all saying near the end of my homecoming talk what every returning missionary seemed to say, was practically required to say because everyone in the audience was waiting to hear it, waiting to hear again what they already knew about missions even though most of them hadn't actually been on one themselves. Here it was: Those were the best two years of my life. The magic words. The cue to smile and nod. Ah. Yes. Reassured. Once again. We knew it. Goes to show. Knew that's what you'd say once you got back. That's what a mission is all about. In fact, if the missionary didn't say the words, then people wouldn't know what to think about his mission, because there really was no other way to think about it, at least in public.
Oh, there'd be a little drama in it: the returning missionary might drop his head a bit after saying the best two years, and start to choke up. Then he'd recover and lean on the pulpit and say, They were also the hardest two years, which'd make him choke up and go all quiet again, and make people maybe wonder for a second whether he was maybe reconsidering the besttwo-years part, or whether there was something more to the best-two-years part that he wasn't bothering to say. But then he'd lift his head back up and say that those two years were the best because they were hard. Well, that's okay then, everybody breathed out; a little hard work never hurt anyone.
The hard part might have scared some guys off, but not me. I'd been mowing lawns in 100-degree heat forever, and driving to the dump once a week to pitchfork out foul-smelling layers of (in descending order) green yellow brown black white grass clippings from a rickety trailer onto sweltering piles of disgusting muck straight out of Dante's Inferno. Maybe converting people would be hard too, but once they converted I wouldn't care one bit how hard it'd been.
There were things besides my vision pushing me to go on a mission too, of course. People at church talked about my going like it was a sure thing, and reminded me every week or so that unlike the lilies of the field I'd better spin and toil to get enough money for all the raiment I'd surely need for the mission I was most definitely going on. In 1974, the prophet of the church, God's mouthpiece, had even come right out and said that every Mormon boy ought to go on a mission. Girls went on missions too, sometimes, but from what I heard only if something wasn't quite right with them. Boys were the opposite: if something wasn't quite right with them, they stayed home. My future wife and daughter, both future missionaries too, would have set me on the non-proverbial concretely molecular porch with Fred Flintstone's saber-toothed cat for thinking that way, but that was how I soaked things up, without a second thought, or come to think of it (finally) even a first.
In fact maybe pushing me as much as anything to go on a mission was the unthought thought of all those girls not on missions. Because the first thing any Mormon girl worth her modest clothing would want to know about any sub-19 Mormon boy was whether he was going on a mission, and you knew what the answer had better be. Sub-19 girls were supposed to encourage you to go, and they'd promise to write, and really would write for a while, but by the time you got back they'd usually already be taken by some R(eturned) M(issionary). The girl I'd liked for the past three years, for instance (I couldn't say she was my girlfriend, since she never let me call her that), would actually be taken by an RM before I even left, which had to be a world land-speed record. But it was okay if a girl didn't wait or if she got engaged in...
