posted
I wrote this little anecdote in my livejournal and had a request to post it here. So, here you go:
-----------------------------
(note: for most of my stories, I stick to the first-name rule; using names of real people but only their first names. For reasons that will be obvious, I had to use the last names of a few characters in this story, but I changed them to protect some sort of anonymity. I don't really know why, because I see no harm in using real names, but the internet always turns out to be a scarier place than it should be. That said, all events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, except for the part where it all really happened.)
Mormon kids are weird. In high school, Mormon kids are sort of weird in that they don't go to the keggers and that they wear significantly larger amounts of cloth to prom, but they spend a lot of their time trying to appear to their peers as non-weird as possible. When Mormon kids go to college, though, they quickly lose these inhibitions on their prudery and geekdom.
A lot of Mormon kids, to be around as many other weird kids as possible, will go to a church college in Udaho and dive right into socially-accepted weirdness. Significant numbers of Mormon kids, however, go to other colleges, and there always manage to be clumps of them in pretty much any American college town. They might even live next door to you. If they live next door to you, though, you probably know about it because, in spite of the fact that they think they are far less conspicuously weird than their Udahoan counterparts and their firm convictions of normalcy, they stick out like Americans in Paris.
Such a group of Mormon kids attends Montana State University. The local singles ward is composed of roughly equal numbers of three demographics: the hometown kids who grew up together, went on missions, and moved back in with their parents; the Montana kids who live away from home, but close enough to drive home on weekends and get cheap tuition; and the out-of-state Independent Mormons who, oddly enough, choose a college based on what they want to study rather than marriage prospects and tend to go to school with the expectations of learning something.
David Owens was a missionary in Brazil for three days. The panic attacks he suffered there succeeded in bringing him back to Hometown and the Hot Tub long enough to get a job and start saving for another try at the missionary experience, and to see his lifetime friend David Martin off on his own missionary experience in the East, that place that we think is still part of America but with which no one here has sufficient experience to verify its existence.
During the years of David M. being back East, David O. took over management responsibilities for the Martins' Hot Tub. Ned 'n May (Mr. and Mrs. Martin who are always referred to collectively) knew the other David well enough to grant him temporary son status and were always amenable to the groups of well-managed college kids who would wind up in their Hot Tub the occasional 11:30 at night. When Ned 'n May decided to re-landscape the backyard and significantly upgrade the Hot Tub environment, no one was sure if it was just the next logical step for the impeccable little Martin house that sits across the street from the big LDS chapel or a plan composed entirely of David O's socio-political aspirations. It doesn't really matter. Every Mormon kid in the vicinity, from the Hometown contingent that had spent many a prom night lounging in profusely modest bathing attire in the old M.H.T. to the seriously studious out-of-state imports who had no idea who Ned 'n May even were but had partaken of their fair share of Hot Tub time and ubiquitous May Martin brownies, showed up to landscape the Martin Yard into a tropical paradise complete with burbling fountain on the side of a suburban hill in windy, barren, cold Southwest Montana.
David M. returned and David O. left, this time for a mission in regions where he had to speak Hillbilly instead of Portuguese. The Martin Hot Tub never skipped a beat, though, and continued reducing to prunes dozens of Mormon toes each weekend.
The Mormon kid crowd shifted, as it does every few months, as well-soaked minions move on, marry one another, and are replaced by weirdness-inhibited freshmen and world-aware transfers who tell hours of stories about tapeworms and converts in corners of the missionary world far from the cold, gusty little hot pot of the Martin backyard. Recently, the ranks have been swelling at a rate a little more rapid than the little old Hot Tub is used to, as seven assorted Montana kids decide in the month of October alone to be baptized and join the crazy little fledgling Mo-crowd in this funny little hometown where people typically get to college and decide to baptize themselves down at the Crystal Bar.
Melissa had run with the Crystal crowd for a few laps, and by accident ended up in a chapel one random Sunday. One Sunday led to another, as they often do, and then to some life-altering decisions. After meeting enough sufficiently weird Mormons and waiting five years for her family to give her permission, she stood, dressed in white and surrounded by singing compadres to enter the water from which she would re-emerged a certified Mormon Kid in the wilds of the American Non-Mormon West.
This particular Sunday in this particular chapel was particularly cold and more than a little gusty, and the surprising number of smiling saints that showed up to watch the baptism was all chatter and pink cheeks as they huddled inside around the font for the service to begin.
It was with the ubiquitous dry Mormon humor that the bishop addressed the audience and announced a slight modification in the schedule for this afternoon's service. Due to an unforseen lack of water in the slow-to-fill font (which Melissa later, laughing, ascribed to Satan fiddling with the drain plug), the baptismal service would be moved to the nearest available waist-deep water source; namely, the Martins' Hot Tub. David O. ran in to the room, pink cheeked, and gave the thumbs-up, having jogged across the street and obtained permission from Ned 'n May, who promptly set about uncovering the hot tub and baking brownies. After singing and praying and listen to a couple well-humored talks, the entire audience of 50 or 60 bundled up and hustled across the street, gathering quickly to the side of the burbling fountain in the Martin backyard paradise with its heavenly little glow against the drab, cold hillside and assembled into a quick auditorium which made of the humbly churning little Hot Tub a center stage of spiritual salvation.
Elder Kinney and Melissa, giggling but defiantly barefoot, slid into the most dignified position possible for a baptism in the churning Hot Tub of Salvation. A couple witnesses were plucked from the audience to make sure when Melissa got dunked, she was totally immersed and didn't hit her head on the temperature gauge or the sculpted blue seats. The crowd was in good spirits as the frigid wind blew in three directions, carrying the steam and the leftover sins out of the Hot Tub and up, swirling violently, into the cold Montana sky.
As Melissa emerged, grinning, she was quickly wrapped in a sub-zero sleeping bag and hustled inside to enjoy smiles and brownie fumes and Ned 'n May's wry jokes. The rest of the audience, happily, hurried back to the chapel to check for frostbite and sing some good-humored hymns.
I paused at the edge of the Martins' lawn and gave one last nod to the Hot Tub, churning there happily in the cold Montana afternoon, bubbling quietly and steaming its darndest as it filled the surprisingly righteous measure of its creation.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Cool]](cool.gif)
![[Hail]](graemlins/hail.gif)
Annie That was a cool story.
