Brief Visit

Two young Mormon missionaries just came by my house, knocking on the front door where only people trying to get my vote and people trying to get my soul ever appear, sending the dogs into a frenzy.

"Let me guess," I said. "You're Mormon missionaries."

One of the boys whom I believe may be a bit of a wise-ass said, "How did you know?" and when I laughed he said, "No, really."

"For one thing, you're carrying The Book Of Mormon." Of course there were the cheap white shirts, the black pants, the ties too but I didn't mention those.

"Have you read it?" the wise-ass Mormon kid's partner in God asked me holding forward his plastic-bound copy of The Book.

"I tried. But, uh, no. And..." I looked at them both. "No."

Their shoulders dropped a little. Obviously I was not a person searching for their truth.

"Look, y'all," I said, "You two go door-to-door trying to offer people your message. Right?"

"Yes," they nodded.

"Well sometimes, maybe the people who answer the door are going to give you a message."

The not-such-a-wise-ass kid nodded enthusiastically. "Oh yes. That often happens." He was trying, I suppose, to show me that he was open-minded.

"I'm going to give you a message," I said. "I want you to think about things. I want you to use this," and I pointed to my head. "I want you to think and use your head and not just what you read in that blue book." They both nodded again. "Oh yes m'am, we do." And the wise-ass kid said, "And this," and he thumped his heart with his fist."

"Yes." Now it was my turn to agree. "That's what I do. Use your head and use your heart. And really think about things."

"We will," they said, and they turned and left my porch, almost as if they were eager to go and I wondered how in the world two kids whose age together doesn't begin to equal my years on this earth ever find the temerity to even begin to think they know The Truth when I, old enough to be their grandmother, a woman who has borne and raised four children, who has lived a life, realize I really don't know shit but I'm pretty sure that if there IS a truth, it is not to be found between the pages of a blue, plastic bound book supposedly transcribed from golden plates by a man who translated them with the aid of a "seer stone" which he put in a hat which he then placed over his face which allowed him to "see" into a stone box where the golden plates were hidden from mortal view.

If those little boys believe that, then I'm almost certain that their ability to use their own powers of thought has already been erased, has disappeared as surely as Joseph Smith's golden plates disappeared when he returned them to The Angel Moroni after he and his seer stone had finished with them, never to be seen again.