Mission(ary) Maybe Possible

I’d only been home a few minutes, just long enough to change clothes, when Lainie texted me in search of a duffle bag for a Lake Powell trip that had popped up just hours earlier. She was on the front step, she said, with her man friend Blake, and if I had one could I bring it out so she could borrow it? I grabbed my old Polaris bag, the only thing large enough to handle Lainie’s gear for an entire weekend and a thank you from a convention last year, and headed out the door. As I stepped onto the landing, a gorgeous, early-twenties brunette with a mild case of ‘bed head’ slithered down the stairs.

Chad.

And it wasn’t even seven p.m.

“Some friends of mine are coming by in a minute,” he said, appearing behind the brunette and patting down his own somewhat more acute case of bed hair.

“And?” I said, as in “and this is supposed to mean something exactly why?”

“You’ll see,” he called over his shoulder, in a near jog by then to catch up to the brunette after stepping past Blake and Lainie. “You’ll see in a minute.”

That was odd but odd is typical Chad. He’d been my nemesis since the day he moved in, as I’ve observed before. But time heals just about everything, and we’d found a way to live in the same building together and actually get along. He’s not a bad person, just a very, very young one.

After depositing the duffle with Lainie, I decided to sit with them for a few minutes, and we talked about a bike ride they’d taken earlier that evening in the canyon, and plans for their Lake Powell weekend. Blake threw in a joking comment every now and again and I enjoyed his sense of humor. Spending more than ten minutes with them as they finish each other’s sentences and expand on each other’s thoughts is like spending an evening at a comedy club, except there’s no cover charge.

There is, however, cigarette smoke. Lainie had just lit her second Marlboro when she looked up and spotted the two women walking into the courtyard. I saw them at about the same time, and we exchanged a look. Mystery solved as to which friends of Chad’s were stopping by.

They approached and quickly introduced themselves. Sister Evita, apparently, and I can’t remember the other’s name (I wouldn’t have remembered Evita if it hadn’t been so unusual. Sister Evita proceeded to present each of us with a nice shiny postcard with a glossy shot of the LDS Temple on one side and her contact information on the other, as well as a handy link to web-based information on the Latter Day Saints religion and a quote from the Book of Mormon.

“Chad asked me to come to see you,” Sister Evita explained to Lainie (at this, I had to feel more than a little relieved. At least he hadn’t sent the missionaries after me).

“Well, I’m not Mormon,” Lainie started, but Sister Evita was on a roll and cut her off quickly with as big of a smile as I’ve seen since the Donny and Marie show went off the air in the seventies. A demure girl, but obviously loaded for bear.

“Oh, you don’t have to be Mormon,” Sister Evita said, “but if there’s anything I can help you with, anything at all. Just anything. Anything in your life at all, at any time.”

“Well, I don’t need anything,” Lainie said. “I’m fine. My life is fine. But thank you.”

“Yes, thank you,” Blake threw in, and I could tell he was on the verge of saying something humorous but was too polite to intrude into Sister Evita’s moment. It was apparent it was her moment alone because her companion had contributed nothing up to that point other than to nod her head affirmatively and beam huge smiles at all of us simultaneously.

“We have a program that’s guaranteed to stop your smoking in seven days,” Sister Evita announced with all the enthusiasm of an old Billy Mays pitch. “No drugs are involved. It involves grapefruit juice, vitamin C, and we will ask you to pray. You do pray, don’t you?”

For anyone who knows her, asking Lainie if she prays is like asking the sun if it’s hot. She’s probably one of the more spiritually grounded people I’ve ever met in my life, it’s just that she isn’t grounded in the Mormon faith. Which she explained, very eloquently and politely, to Sister Evita and her companion (who continued to nod and smile, especially as Sister Evita attempted to shoot down every point Lainie put out there about her own religious views) and the whole conversation probably would have continued for all time and eternity (which Sister Evita emphatically assured Lainie that she could have if she’d just drink the grapefruit juice and take the Vitamin C) when suddenly, for no reason I could determine, Sister Evita just stopped. Maybe there was a time limit or something, and she wasn’t allowed to exhort longer than ten minutes in any one visit.

We thanked her and her companion for their time, and graciously thanked her again for her offer to be of assistance “with anything, any time, in any area of our lives at all, no matter what it is”.

“Chad,” Lainie observed, lighting a final Marlboro as the missionaries departed the courtyard, “is a dead man.”

I wouldn’t have wanted to be Chad at that moment, so it’s a good thing he was off wherever he was with his brunette. I excused myself then back to my place, and realized halfway up the stairs I was still holding onto my postcard. I thought about throwing it away, but stuck it in a book, instead. I’m always losing bookmarkers and that would work as well as anything, although I couldn’t imagine myself calling on Sister Evita for ‘anything, at any time, in any area of my life’. Unfortunately, she hadn’t won any converts with her visit, and I didn’t think I was alone in feeling I was the only person who wouldn’t be calling her in the future. Which made me think the whole business of being a missionary must be pretty difficult. Kind of like door to door sales, only without the commission check at the end of the month.

It probably took a lot of perseverance to tackle being a missionary at all, and for a minute I thought maybe I’d call her back just to give the poor kid a break. But the minute passed pretty quickly. I knew what the conversation would be, and I really didn’t want to have it. So that’s one missionary I couldn’t help with their track record of converts vs. those who never called back.

That had to be, if you think about it, as discouraging for missionaries as it is for door to door salespeople. They probably share a lot of the same frustrations as Mary Kay reps, Avon ladies and multi-level marketers the world over. Maybe what they needed was a gimmick. Mary Kay pulls women in by the thousands every year with the ‘free facial’, and Avon pulls them in with the free samples. If it was true that Sister Evita would show up at a moment’s notice to truly assist me with ‘anything, at any time, in any area of my life’, she might be onto something and actually get a call back so at least she could report some level of progress. But missionaries never show up when you really need them.

I could have used a missionary on Monday night, when I was tackling the plumbing in my bathroom sink.

I could have used a missionary last time I walked to The Store and bought more groceries than I should have, considering I didn’t have the car to offload them into and Basil was too small to strap one on her back.

I probably could have used a missionary when I was painting the den, and I know I could have used a missionary the last time I moved the TV armoire.

A missionary or two would have been immensely helpful the last time Basil bolted in a snowstorm and I trudged through the neighborhood looking for her.

If I had a missionary with a ladder, I’d be thrilled because I could get my exterior windows clean.

Maybe Sister Evita and her companion were going about this whole thing the wrong way. Maybe instead of calling on people who hadn’t asked to see them, they should focus on converting the Mary Kay crowd. Mary Kay women are the most persuasive, persistent women I’ve ever met in my life, and they sway even the most intelligent women over to their way of thinking. I personally fell prey to the free facial in my thirties and paid over $160 for a face cream actually believing it was going to make me look twenty-five again, possibly even as young as twelve if I applied too much, too often. Maybe Mary Kay and the Mormon Church could join forces, even if there would be a few differences in operations once that was accomplished. You’d see less bicycles and more pink cadillacs (but only for the most successful missionaries, and the car would be subject to repossession if their success records slipped). They’re both, if you think about it, big believers in not smoking, and the powers of liberal doses of Vitamin C.

If I don’t manage to lose that bookmarker, I might just give Sister Evita a call some day, and present my idea.