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 record-setting fashion, I told myself, because another thing I knew without thinking was that by going on a mission I'd at least be investing in the next crop of Mormon girls who would be around when I got back.
With all that non-thinking going on I couldn't say down to the nearest decimal exactly what was pushing me with exactly what force to get out on a mission. I could've been laid out in some sort of spiritual anatomical theatre, like in one of those old Dutch paintings, and been sliced up in front of a bunch of curious people jostling to see which of my motives for going were pure and which came from all the social conditioning around me, and the results would've been as muddled for me as for most people. Oh, I felt like I had the testimony or witness that Mormons are always talking about, the feeling from God telling you that what you were doing was right and that the church was true, but maybe even some of that came from all the pats on the back I was getting because I was doing something everyone/everygirl at church wanted me to do, or from the pats I was sure not to get if I didn't.
I wouldn't have cared about sorting it out like that though, or even have known it was possible. I j'ust knew I wanted to go.
* * *
On that hot July 7 when hope was still running up and down and across, I hustled my skinny little self out to the middle of the L-shaped street that confluenced so suburbanly right in front of my kitty-corner house, because I wanted to see the mailman as soon as he came swaying around the corner.
It was so hot out today you could actually see the heat, rolling across the street in crazy, hazy waves, like the asphalt was melting or something and the two mingy arms of the L were actually and not just metaphorically confluencing. But I hardly even noticed, for one because it was this hot and wavy every day, and for two because I was busy calculating that if church leaders met in Salt Lake on Thursdays to decide on missionary calls, and put them in the mail on Fridays, then my own call would probably arrive at my house here in the center of central California on a Monday. Today.
No way was I going to stand politely on the curb for something that big. I wanted to be clear out over the manhole cover so I could look all the way down the block, even if it meant Mrs. Dinkel sticking her head out the door real fast as usual and yelling from somewhere beneath her armor-plated curlers You kids get out of the street!
And suddenly there he was, stopping and starting at every house until finally he stopped, against every regulation of the postal driving code, right next to me in the middle of the street, because a veteran mailman like that knew that a young guy like me didn't stand out waving his arms in a street rolling with heat waves unless he was waiting for something big.
A few of my many brothers and sisters were standing out in the street now too, their soles also going into meltdown. Just a bunch of junk mail, I thought, bummed, as I flipped through the pile, but I kept flipping and whadda ya know in between the ads from Kmart and Sears and Woolworths was a big white official-looking envelope from Salt Lake City with my name on it. Here it is! I yelled, and the people standing around made some noises while my parents ran outside too.
Years later it would practically be against Mormon rules to just rip open the call right there on the street to see where you were going. Instead you'd have to wait until that night so 300 of your closest friends could squeeze in for the big occasion and the crowd could really go wild. But I didn't know about any fancy ritual like that, so I ripped away and moved my eyes straight to where my teachers said a good thesis sentence should be, right at the end of the first paragraph: Belgium Antwerp Mission! I yelled again. Everything started going in slow motion with those words, because even though I'd hardly ever heard them before, even though one of the words had twerp in it, and even though they were listed backwards in that odd way Mormons had of writing mission names by country (or state) first and then city, I was sure they would change everything.
Everyone cheered, but they would've cheered even if I'd said Montana Bozeman! Still, these cheers had some genuine Wow! or even Wow? to them, because no one had the faintest clue in the world where in the world Belgium was. Where's Belgium? they all asked in hot-footed puzzlement. So did everyone else I told over the next few weeks. No one even bothered asking Where's Antwerp?
I wasn't exactly sure myself where Belgium was, much less Antwerp: both were in Europe, I knew that, and Europe was good. And I was as surprised as anyone, because just the week before in order not to be surprised I'd studied a list of all 150 or so Mormon missions around the world and Belgium Antwerp had not been on it. Wait a minute, I thought: that meant it was a brand-new mission. And that meant — shiver — I would be one of the first missionaries there! Oh, missionaries had probably set foot in the place before, because they'd set foot everywhere, but not in the sort of concentrated biblical-proportion numbers a brand-new mission would mean.
I ran into the house ahead of everyone to get at the World Book Encyclopedia first, and read everything I could about Belgium, at least two whole pages, including that it was right above France, that it was about the size of Maryland, that it had about 10 million people, and that — can you believe this — they were almost all Catholic.
Catholic! That got me shivering again, the way a guy might shiver before playing a big game or fighting an epic battle. Almost all Catholic! Now that was the sort of challenge I'd hoped for. My teachers at church said that every church had a portion of the truth in it, but that portion couldn't be very big, I thought, not in those plain-looking Protestant churches I'd visited once or twice, and especially not in the evil Catholic Church I wouldn't on my life set foot in. Even though the Catholic Newman Center around the corner actually looked a lot like my own church, and even though I had a couple of Catholic friends at school who looked a lot like I did, I knew that beneath all that if you kept digging you'd eventually uncover that the Catholic Church was wicked. And weird. The Church of the Devil. The Whore of All the Earth. The Great and Abominable. What great news!
Wouldn't all those Belgian people in Catholic darkness be glad to see me? And Catholics there were bound to be a lot more wicked than the pretty ordinary-looking sort I saw walking out of the Newman Center every Sunday morning in the same polyester dresses and rumpled suits I saw at my own church. How fantastic!
See, the harder farther and newer a mission, then the more heroic it was, not to mention the greater the share of honor it'd bring, as Shakespeare's Henry V might've put it if he'd been stirring up fellows for Mormon missions instead of for the Battle of Agincourt. Privately, I also calculated, like a medieval knight calculating the payoff of a really big joust, that this greater share of honor just had to mean a big boost in my standing among girls — because I was sure that the second thing a Mormon girl worth her modest clothing would want to know about me was where I was going on a mission.
I was sure that being able to say Australia, Japan, or Belgium would make me bigger and more spiritual and more heroic in especially female minds than saying Nevada, Kansas, or Ohio would. I'd tried telling myself and others that I'd be content with a mission to some ordinary place, but I'd said that only because wishing for somewhere special might bring bad luck, or make God teach me a lesson in humility by sending me to Montana.
Why just the year before, no less an authority than a Returned Missionary who'd gone to Japan had casually asked me while we were casually walking along casually talking about missions whether I'd like to go foreign. Yes, I admitted, I would. Big mistake: I'd walked right into his casual-looking trap. Because when he heard my answer, RM got serious, looked down at the ground, and said like he was uttering some law laid down at Creation and understood by every going-foreign missionary ever since: Then you won't. That was it. Decided. Over. Finished. Like John Calvin and a whole bunch of saints, this guy believed that God's will for you just about always came in the form of what you least wanted to do. So if you wanted to go foreign then you could bet your hoped-for passport you wouldn't. In fact the best thing you could do to help yourself go foreign was to wish to go to Montana, but you had to really wish it.
Thank God that this guy and Calvin and all those saints were wrong, at least this time, because even though I yanked and tugged mightily I just could not root out my hope to go foreign — but then I went foreign anyway. What luck! How would I have survived not going foreign, or not speaking English, I wondered? Speaking English would have felt too close to ordinary life, too close to my regular self: I needed something bigger than that. A going-foreign mission was just the thing to bring out my true self, instead of the pretty ordinary self that'd been pretty convincingly on display so far. In fact a going-foreign mission, it hit me now, was what God had been saving me for all these years.
