You’ve all heard about our bug situation here in Provo, so i won’t belabor that dismal situation any further except to say that the provo city housing authority has authorized a thermal strike on our apartment. We have to be out of it all day on Thursday so they can bring in a furnace of sorts to heat our place up to 120 degrees for eight hours, which should kill every living organism in the place. Plus melt all our electronics, like computers, and wilt all the wall hangings – so we’ll have to lug all that stuff out onto the patio for the day. Even our big screen tv.
Which is merely a preamble to my recollections of bugs in thailand when i was just a wee missionary there. 48 years ago. How is that possible? I haven’t lived that long, and neither have any of you. We should be bent and wizened fossils, cackling toothlessly over a game of checkers in some nursing home. But instead we have wives and build or repair houses and eat good solid meals with our own teeth still. I don’t get it. Why is time standing still for us? I think there was something in the air in thailand, or something we ate there, like som tum, that slowed down the aging process. We’ve all passed out second childhoods without noticing it, and are now working on our third childhoods . . .
Anywho – back to the bugs.
Nobody ever warned me there would be so many varieties of bugs in thailand, or that they would be so pervasive and aggressive, getting in my face like a grade school bully.
I took a brand new electric shaver in a smart leather case with me to thailand; a gift from my elders quorum in minneapolis. One morning in bangkapi i opened the case in the bathroom and lo and behold a huge flying cockroach was nestled inside. It gave me a nonchalant look as it shivered its wings. I shrieked and dropped the case, breaking the electric razor into pieces. I couldn’t afford another electric razor, so i had to revert to the barbaric practice of scraping my chin with a cheap plastic blade. The scabs made it hard for me to apply my clown makeup evenly.
Elder ah ching was a big strapping hawaiian elder, unafraid of man or beast. His motto, when taxed by his companion elder nebeker for being somewhat lackadaisical in missionary work, was to say ‘i just want to be an angel.’ there were three companionships that shared a communal bedroom, i recall, and we kept after the maid to get rid of the wall geckos, which had overrun the place.
‘No’ said elder ah ching, ‘you want them around because they keep the cockroaches down.’ but he changed his tune one night when a gecko on the ceiling lost its footing and fell into his open, snoring, mouth. His screams not only woke the rest of us up, but nearly and prematurely propelled us into the telestial kingdom.
We had to place each leg of our beds in bowls of turpentine, lest the little white ants crawl up the bed legs and onto our mattress – there to wander restlessly over our bodies each night, silently chewing on our epidermis.
On tour with the singing group in phitsanulok one evening, elder wright was crooning a thai love ballad – and how those thai ladies loved his voice! There were several large stage lights on him, which attracted a bevy of flying creatures from out of the night sky. Just as he opened his mouth to hit a mellow chord, something large and scaly flew into his mouth. And he swallowed it. He was out of action for the rest of that show. He couldn’t even play the pump organ for me during my clown act at intermission. He was a great accompanist. He knew all the waltz tunes and circus marches i liked. In fact, he got to the point where he didn’t even notice what he was playing during my act anymore, and would segue into a church hymn, like master the tempest is raging, playing it in ragtime, without even noticing.
The infamous mot dang, red fire ants, were ubiquitous in certain rural areas. If you were foolish enough to walk through a weedy field in those areas you picked up dozens of ‘em on your pants legs, and if you didn’t brush them off quickly enough they gave you an almighty painful bite that would blister for a week.
A centipede crawled up my leg one afternoon as i was giving a discussion to a startled thai family – who wondered why joseph smith’s story had to be told with a frenzied irish jig.
But certainly you have your own tales to tell when it comes to bugs in thailand, so i’ll cut short this particular ramble down memory lane. Besides, it’s nearly 6 a.m. and i have to make a greenbean and frankfurter casserole to serve for brunch this morning. Amy has been after me to use up the five cans of green beans we have in the pantry. So i’ll mix ‘em with some cream of mushroom soup and a package of hotdogs, top the whole thing with some process cheese and cracker crumbs, then bake the whole shebang in a casserole dish to serve with leftover cornbread from yesterday. When you make cornbread right it is crunchy and slightly grainy and lasts for a week or more. Because so many people complained about our meal yesterday – it was vegetable soup (because meat is too damn expensive) with cornbread, and some of the old ladies complained because it was vegan and because the pieces of cornbread we served out (all for free, mind you) were so small. So I told myself it’s time to quit this racket and move on to some other kind of service. Like temple work. Then someone i had never seen before came by and dropped twenty dollars into the kitty without even asking for a bowl of soup. That’s why there’s going to be green bean casserole today.
And then we’re going to the temple, too, this afternoon, to do initiatory proxy work.
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