I do not get these interest rates;
they're high because inflation
threatens to engulf us
as a people and a nation?
Excuse my economics, please,
but that is Greek to me.
My finance chops are shaky,
but it seems a fantasy.
Rather, let the Central Bank
it's assets give away --
so we can squander it at will
with one more big payday.
And then we all can live in tents
and vinyl records play.
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.
My pride did push me to behave
in ways that lured me to the grave
of abandon, there to rave --
and say "Thou art the man."
But then I turned to face the light
and with great help made bad things right,
so to the Savior say I might --
"Thou art the MAN."
Church attendance was rather sparse this Sunday morning here in Provo. I guess nobody heard about the Nestle Crunch Bar all the fathers would get right after the service was over in honor of Father's Day.
It reminded me of my brief stint as branch president in Thailand during my mission long times ago. We rarely had more than 5 people, plus livestock and poultry, show up on Sunday.
Church was held in our cinder block house on the outskirts of Khon Kaen. Attendees included a professor from Khon Kaen University, our maid Sister Phiilailuck, a local duck farmer, a shell-shocked Peace Corps volunteer, and the occasional American Marine from Nam Phong Air Force Base, where they were flying covert bombing raids over Laos and Cambodia at the time.
We usually invited the Peace Corps guy to stay for Sunday dinner. Sister Phiilailuck did not work on Sundays, but she always left us a huge selection of curries, salads, and cold rice for the day to warm up ourselves. I wish I could remember that guy's name, but I can't. He was short and blonde and had decided he'd made a mistake in volunteering to go abroad. He was a homebody, not a wanderer, and as we sat eating our exotic leftovers he'd reminisce about the bread his mother baked and the milk and honey his father produced on their farm and how they'd all sit down together for a big bowl of bread with milk and honey on Sundays. He'd get a little misty-eyed. His Thai was execrable, having learnt it at some government program back in the States for a month prior to coming over. (As was mine when I first got to Thailand!) So he felt pretty isolated and lonely. When his time was up he dropped by our place, as happy as a pig in mud, to leave us his stash of pork & beans.
The duck farmer was a nice guy, very quiet and devout. He killed a turkey for Thanksgiving and delivered it to Sister Phiilailuck to pluck and cook for us. All that day as Elder Day and I were out tracting we thought of the delicious roast turkey we'd have when we got back home that evening. But alas, Sister Phiilailuck had no experience with either a bird that size or with an oven (in fact, we didn't have one -- she did all her cooking for us on two gas rings.) So we returned to a large dead bird smoldering in a wok. We broke out the pork & beans instead.
While branch president, I was told by the mission office to find us a new house and place of worship. Our current abode had shutters downstairs, but no screens or bars in the windows. During Sunday services it was not unusual for a stray chicken to flutter in during Sacrament to check things out. Curious water buffalo stuck their heads in during the hymn singing to find out what all the ruckus was about. And sometimes joined in with a pious bellow.
But the biggest problem were the flies, which came in like locusts. They settled on our food and refused to budge even when we waved our arms athletically over them. I kept getting ill as they poisoned the food, although the other Elders didn't seem to be affected that much. So my proselytizing hours were dismal.
I never did find us another place. Decent rental houses were mysteriously expensive for farangs like us who didn't have Thai girlfriends. A piece of Siamese eye candy could spread some lolly around for her man, to promote an inexpensive pad, but we upright lads were out of the running.
I can no longer put names to most people I knew in Thailand. My missionary journals, faithfully scribbled upon during my two year stint in Thailand, have all disappeared over the years due to frequent moves and a divorce. My philosophy has always been 'I can put stuff in a cardboard box, but I'll be darned if I can be bothered to carry that box around!' So names, among other things, have dispersed like the ten tribes of Israel, along with my journals.
Hence I cannot tell you the name of our Khon Kaen University professor -- who worked on the Thai translation of the Book of Mormon and was a counselor to President Brown. What I do remember is that one Sunday he came to services, obviously out of sorts.
And this is as good a place as any to explain that Thais are a cheery and affable people, who will give you the rice out of their bowl at the drop of a mango. But at the same time many of them are subject to deep and savage bouts of melancholy and doubt that rise up like a summer thunderstorm, burst, and then disappear as quickly as they came. This particular Sunday this particular brother was in such a surly mood. After services he stayed behind to inform us that the whole Church was a fraud and imposition and that he was through with it.
I don't claim any special revelatory powers or gifts, or to have vast reserves of patience, but as someone who had already been out in the world living with a bunch of psychotic misfits (clown alley), I didn't take his rant all that seriously. I remained calm and undisturbed. I figured that after he got it off his chest, he'd get over it. (Which he did.) But Elder Day was so alarmed by his outburst that he told me we should drop everything to take the next bus the 281 miles down to Bangkok to inform President Brown personally of this grave apostasy.
Elder Day was like that; he was always wanting to rush down to Bangkok to inform the mission office of something or other that seemed a crisis to him. The maid kept beer in our fridge for when her non-member brother visited? Our squat toilet backed up? A local Protestant minister was saying the Book of Mormon was the work of the devil? Bam! We'd better get down to Bangkok to report on it right away! To which I'd patiently reply 'May wai.' (No way.)
Elder Day had but one joke, which he liked to trot out at least once a week. It went like this:
'A farmer worked hard to send his son to college for an education. When the son graduated he visited his father on the farm, and his father asked him 'Son, what all did you learn at that there university?" To which the son replied "Why dad, I learned all about Pi R Squared in my math classes!" The father grew red in the face and yelled at his son: "You damn fool, pie are not square -- pie are round!"
I heard that Elder Day eventually picked up a degree in civil engineering after his mission. I hope he was able to pick up at least one more joke along the way, too . . .
I should probably look up all my old companions that I
so cheerfully malign in these memoirs, using social media, but when I joined Thailand Missionaries on Facebook I was immediately accused of being a troll and then bashed unmercifully in the comments section. So I unfollowed that group pronto and haven't tried to reconnect with anyone since. We artistes bruise so easily.
***********************************
An email response about the above from one of my companions --
I remember Elder Day, but don't remember any interactions with him.
harvey brown was a jolly and tubby little man, built along the lines of Kris Kringle. he was also our mission president in thailand after president morris was released. he'd had a long successful career with the state department before retiring. i don't believe he'd ever been stationed in thailand or, for that matter, knew anything about the country at all. as he told me the first time i met him: "elder torkildson, i'm just fat, dumb, and happy -- call me harvey the hugger!'
well, i never did call him that but i came to appreciate his good humor early on. he loved to hear stories about my experience with ringling bros circus, and whenever i had an interview with him the apes (assistants to the president) would admonish me beforehand that he was a busy man and couldn't spare me more than ten minutes. those ten minutes as often as not turned into an hour, with me telling him about how the clown car worked or my monumental fight with michu the world's smallest man.
harvey the hugger encouraged us elders and sisters to come up with new ways and means to garner good PR for the church in thailand. that was the purpose of my clown shows, and the singing group.
"think big!" he'd exhort us. "come see me with any idea at any time -- my door is always open!" and indeed it was -- but behind that jolly exterior was a stone cold pragmatist.
"what's in it for us?" he'd always ask, after some elder had explained his hare-brained scheme. there were a lot of organizations and companies that wanted a tie-in with the church, because they knew it was a rich world-wide operation, and they expected to leech off of it for their own benefit. but unless there was some concrete benefit to the church, president brown always gave these schemes the thumbs down.
one idea finally met with his approval. i no longer remember who came up with the idea. it was called "run for your life." Or 'wing phua chiwid.'
it was inspired, i guess, by all the old chinese men and women who spent their early mornings exercising in the park, going through a series of slow motion movements that allegedly improved everything from their mental capacities to their sex life. it was noticed that more and more young men, and women, were joining in with these tai chi groups in the park. so let's horn in on this trend to grab some free PR for the church! seemed to be the general idea.
pamphlets were printed up, showing a grinning group of thais jogging along a hibiscus-strewn path, and extolling the virtues of a good morning run each day. the whole concept is contained in the book 'aerobics' by a us air force doctor. we all were given copies of the book to read and told to start inviting men and women to come out at 5 in the ever lovin' morning to join us for a jog down the local soi.
it wasn't a bad idea. we got to wear bright yellow t-shirts, labeled with 'wing phua chiwid' which literally means run for life.
it wasn't a bad idea, but it wasn't something my body liked to do. at the time elder terry, from snowflake, arizona, was my companion, and he was a little dynamo. he could run all morning and not feel a thing. after about six blocks i would be left behind panting and developing shin splints. but we kept up with the program for several months. until word came from salt lake to phase it out. so we did.
seems like the mission office never got any good news from salt lake. whenever the apes said there was word from salt lake we prepared for the worst.
just before my mission was up president brown called me into his office to ask if i would like to serve an extra four months in thailand. he thought he could pull some strings to have it happen. would i!? i would have loved that. but word came from salt lake, and, in fact, i even got a letter from the church missionary committee, stating firmly that once my 24 month were up they were up and no one single day more would be added to my time serving as a missionary. It was time to return home, resume my education, and find a good and proper wife to marry. End of story.
i was with elder terry when another missive came from salt lake -- disband the singing group and get rid of the clown. so i was sent to knon kaen as the branch president. my companion was elder day. that lasted two months, during which time president brown worked his wiles on salt lake and had the ban on the singing group and on my clowning lifted. so i was brought back to bangkok, and never left its environs again. and i never had to run another step, either, for wing phua chiwid. although i kept the aerobics paperback with me when i returned home and back to the circus. my good old pal tim holst and i tried to run aerobically each day between shows. but it got too hard for me to take off my makeup and put it back on in time to make come in for the second show.
hey, wasn't i supposed to tell you guys about my crush on sister mumford in this episode? oh well, it'll keep.
Wife, I'm getting older, and the flame of passion
flags;
my heart for you still thunders, but is muffled by stale rags.
I take you in my arms, my lusty wench, and then regret
that I've become a rag doll with no hardened bayonet.
Eight children did we have so long ago it seems a yarn
we tell now to each other while my socks you sit and darn.
Still and all, though parts of me no longer do their duty,
I'll not forget, but cry up thanks, for your eternal beauty!
Journalists face harassment, fight against misinformation and are keenly aware of the industry's financial troubles and the dim view many Americans have of them.
Despite all that, most love their jobs and wouldn't trade it for something else.
Those were among the findings in a survey of nearly 12,000 journalists
conducted by the Pew Research Center and released on Tuesday. (AP)
If ya like just what you're doin' and you do not give a
hoot
if you are tarred and feathered and stripped down to union suit;
if insults hurled like baseballs and the frequent verbal bomb
thrown at you don't matter -- cuz you got so much aplomb;
and the money that you're making would insult a galley slave --
well, you either are a lunatic or some reporter brave!
The glamor and the glory of that kind of work has waned.
Reporters work for companies completely addlebrained.
Their job might vanish any time; their beat no longer trod --
snubbed by hedge fund managers who think that they are God.
And yet, and yet, these foolish wags, these men and women brisk,
tell each other they enjoy this kind of work and risk.
I don't know that I cotton to their self-delusion grand --
reminding me of Moses going to the Promised Land.
And, really, I ain't never seen such folk who do subsist
on pain and pandemonium -- each one's a masochist!
But one man's meat or poison, as the Good Book says somewhere,
can make the meanest scribbler feel awful debonair.
Montrii was the only investigator I ever really had. because i was tapped to do clown shows and be the intermission for the fabled singing group during my mission in thailand i had precious little time to find, teach, and get to know any real investigators.
my track record of baptisms while in thailand: bupkis.
anyway. i discovered montrii one dreary monsoon evening while i was still with elder seliger. it was too wet for a street meeting and it was too early to go home and so elder seliger gave in to the inevitable and we went tracting door to door in a run-down neighborhood where dogs copulated up and down the soi amidst soggy floating piles of garbage. this was in bangkok proper. a low rent and low life district. the street lights were barely functioning. so everything had a sickly yellow cast to it, like in a Monogram charlie chan movie. (if you're not getting these references, don't worry about it -- some of them are real but most of them i just make up for the hell of it.)
we came upon a row of apparently abandoned tuks. every missionary who ever landed in thailand knows these tuks -- thrown up in an opium-fueled frenzy by isaan day laborers, these five story blocks of poured concrete housed shops and cafes on the ground floor and the proprietor's family above. they were built and abandoned like quonset huts, and held together about as well.
this particular row looked to be the abode of bats and owls. no lights on. all the ground floor entrances barred with rusty iron gates. except the last one. this one was halfway open. elder seliger thought we should avoid it altogether, since it looked like something out of a slasher movie. but i felt a stirring, maybe of the spirit or maybe just dumb curiosity. so i convinced him we should poke our noses in it just in case.
deep inside the tuk a candle guttered low, with a figure hunched over it. we cleared our throats and said 'sawdi khrab?' and the hunched figure slowly got up -- to reveal a young man with long lanky black hair creeping over his face like kudzu.
all thais are innately polite, and montrii quickly invited us to hunch down around his smoking candle and then offered us each a bottle of warm beer. we politely refused and launched into our patter on the word of wisdom. he seemed taken by the idea that bad food and drink result in bad health. elder seliger remained mum most of the time, essentially letting me do all the talking, or stammering. i made an appointment with montrii to come back to his derelict tuk the next evening. as we swam through the tropical rain back to our apartment i felt a pardonable pride in rooting out a lost soul we might possibly save. elder seliger would have none of it.
'that guy' he said in disgust, 'is a squatter and probably wanted by the police -- why else would he be holed up in that haunted house?'
i thought to myself 'you're just a texas redneck who doesn't know red beans from rice -- montrii is golden, or i'm a baptist!' outloud I merely grunted, neatly sidestepping an open manhole.
we saw montrii the next night, and the next. and then we never saw him again. obviously, he didn't have a phone so we couldn't call him. he never did explain what he was doing in that tumble down old tuk. and then president morris sent out an imperative ukase that all missionary pairs must double their tracting hours by the end of the month or face consequences so terrible they were not even hinted at. elder seliger, as devoted to the gospel as i was, and twice as stubborn, vowed we would not only double our tracting hours but triple them. so we stayed out in the blazing sun (just our luck, the monsoon season ended early) from dawn to way past our bedtime . . . tracting, tracting, tracting. i finally asked president morris for permission to buy a hat to wear, because the ferocious sun was fast fusing the top of my head to my ears. my hair was bleached white, like bones on the desert sands.
i picked up a snazzy little number -- a green felt fedora with a perky little feather on the side. it was stolen by khamoys when i was transferred up to Khon Kaen. by then elder seliger had been moved on to bigger and better things, and my new senior companion was elder lang. he was from california, and was he laid back! we nearly stopped proselytizing altogether, as he began to put together the singing group with elder wright. we spent most of our time in various studios auditioning elders and sisters. i helped pick out sister mumford for the group -- and quickly developed a crush on her . . .
but that's a story for another time.
back in the day, the long long day, nearly half a century ago, when i arrived in thailand as a missionary, i was teamed with elder bart seliger. he introduced me to the concept of the thai street meeting.
we were stationed out towards the don muang airport. on particularly hot days elder seliger would say 'elder torkildson, get a stack of pamphlets -- we're going out to the airport!' the don muang airport, you see, was air conditioned.
back then thailand was an open and trusting country. in the case of morals, it was 'wide-open,' but it was also a welcoming and accepting place, where government restrictions really didn't apply to farangs like elder seliger and me. with his sun glasses, white shirt and black necktie, most thais thought elder seliger was from the CIA. so all doors were open to us. (but not all hearts -- the concept of the need for a personal savior in the person of Jesus Christ did not penetrate many hearts or minds while i was there.)
we'd wander through the waiting area, passing out pamphlets, and then elder seliger would barge right into the administrative offices to harass the secretaries, who, like secretaries everywhere in the world, were charged by their bosses with keeping everyone out. when he got the inevitable cold shoulder he would draw himself up to his full six foot one height and say 'mr. praphan will hear about this!' praphan is a very common name in thailand, like smith here in the usa, and elder seliger was betting that one of the high mucky mucks in that particular office was named praphan. it usually worked -- the secretary would get all flustered, and then usher us in to see her boss. where we would completely befuddle the poor man by giving him a discussion on family home evening.
but on days when the weather was cooler and the sky overcast, elder seliger liked to hold street meetings. on busy street corners. in public parks. and especially at the talad -- the open air market.
he wasn't big on door to door tracting.
'it's a waste of time, elder' he'd tell me. 'when you do get into a house the television is blaring and the kids are screaming. the mother is scared we're there to kidnap them and if the father's home he's usually drunk on Chang beer.'
so i'd be delegated to carry the street meeting poster and tripod. the poster read 'what is the purpose of life?'
we'd set up in the talad, close to a noodle stand, and eleder seliger would begin to work his magic. he was a people person. he could size up a man or woman, thai or chinese or farang, and fearlessly engage them in conversation, striking the right chord every time to discover their hobby or interests. Me, i just mumbled and stumbled along like the cliched greenie i was. luckily, my old clown partner steve smith had sent me a shipment of animal balloons, so i would make an elephant or a parrot for some kid and then i'd have my own little crowd of spectators, at which point i would try to explain the plan of salvation to the crowd. but all they were interested in was getting a free balloon.
elder seliger did it the right way. whatever subject he was quietly discussing with a man or woman, he would eventually bring them back to our sign and begin telling them about the pre existence.
then the gai yang cart would arrive. this is smoked grilled chicken, marinated in lime juice, fish sauce, and fiery little mouse shit peppers. that's their official thai name. mouse shit peppers. the incense of that grilled chicken would lure us over to the cart for some wings and thighs, washed down with fanta pineapple pop. then we'd go back to work for a while. then it would be time for som tum, that luscious green papaya salad made with a mortar and pestle that caused our mouths to pucker in ecstasy.
then back to the poster.
until the pork peanut satay guy showed up. skewers of pork liver grilled over glowing coals, coated with a sweet and fiery crushed peanut glaze. oh mamma -- those babies went fast, so we always suspended operations until we'd had a dozen or two of 'em.
by then it was lunch time, so we adjourned to the noodle shop for a generous plate of shrimp fried rice with klong weed on the side. and another fanta. i always insisted on a small bowl of fish sauce in which floated mouse shit peppers and lime wedges, to sprinkle over my rice. mmmmmmm, i can still taste that kick today!
we'd go back to our street meeting for a bit, but being conscientious missionaries, we'd soon head back to the apartment for several hours of napping -- er, i mean language study!
then in the evening it was back out to the night market, where the roti man made his little feather light pancakes, sprinkled with sugar and drizzled with canned sweetened condensed milk. i'd make a few balloon swans and elephants. elder seliger would flirt (harmlessly and politely) with the swarms of teenage girls who were at the same time intrigued and frightened by the big hairy farang with sunglasses.
our efforts ended at nine, we would head for home, each of us clutching a large bag of deep fried banana fritters.
and believe it or don't, i actually lost weight during my two years in thailand! I guess those street meetings were pretty hard work, after all.
