Elder Seliger

I, Timmy, having been born of goofy parents, do hereby continue my personal saga and reminiscences. But before I get started I want to share an illumination that came to me just this morning, after I’d gone to the Provo Rec Center for a swim and hot tub soak, and then proceeded over to Smith’s for a bagel with cream cheese. As I sat at a table by their produce section I watched a man in a black apron pick up each onion, one by one, and vacuum them off. This struck me as so absurd that I nearly strained a cheek muscle from grinning. I can just imagine his homecoming tonight --

“I’m home, honey!”

“How was work, sweetheart? What did they have you do today?”

“Oh, not much -- just vacuum the onions like always.”

In a world where a man gets paid to vacuum onions in a supermarket, why bother to take things too seriously? That’s all I’m saying.

My previous entry about Elder Lang and the stolen fish inevitably reminds me of my very first missionary companion in Thailand. Elder Bart Seliger. We hit it off from the start. He was a genius with the Thai language and I was a dunce. He slept in, sometimes until 7 a.m., and I was always up by 5, before the cleft of dawn, trying to read the Book of Mormon in Thai. Round about 6 my eyes would cross, my head would droop, and I’d snooze in a pool of my own drool until Elder Seliger gave me a hearty slap on the shoulder blades, asking “Well, Elder Torkildson, are you ready to go get ‘em?”

Elder Seliger’s teaching and leadership methods were simple and direct. Whenever we got into a house he would introduce us and then have me tell the Joseph Smith story. Didn’t matter that I could not yet put more than two or three Thai words together at a time -- he never interrupted or corrected. In fact, sometimes he dozed off as I sweat blood to finish my narrative. I have to add that our Thai hosts never grew bored or fractious with my mangling of their native tongue. They sat and smiled and nodded, not understanding a word that I said.

Thailand has always been cursed with packs of feral dogs that roam the humid sois and patrol the weedy banks of klongs, just waiting for a farang to show up so they can snarl and hurl themselves at him. The Thais, being Buddhist, cannot bring themselves to gather up strays and put them down, so the mutts grow in numbers and impudence until the local village council calls in a Muslim butcher to eradicate the most egregious canines. After my first encounter with these slavering beasts I took a stout bamboo walking stick with me whenever I went out with Elder Seliger. He, on the other hand, had a more subtle and effective approach. He had a small plastic squirt gun which he filled with ammonia. Any dog that even looked at him the wrong way got a spritz in the snout and ran away howling in agony. After a while, all the dogs in the neighborhood recognized his lanky, sharp-nosed appearance, and gave us both a wide berth.  

Unlike Elder Lang, Elder Seliger never got trunky. But he did find ways to work smarter instead of harder. He liked to business tract -- not in the local stores that sold fish sauce, rattan furniture, and pickled skunk cabbage. No, his idea of business tracting was to go into the busiest and most modern business section he could find, full of banks and skyscrapers, and then barge into the offices of every executive on each floor, give the secretaries the brush off, and see the head man to give him a pamphlet about Family Home Evening and ask if we could come to his home to show him how to conduct this inspired program for the benefit of his family. And he did it all in English, which impressed the heck out of most executives, who had a smattering of English or had actually lived in Great Britain or the United States. The first few times I did this with him I was paralyzed with fear -- but when I realized that nobody ever called the cops on us, I got into the swing of things with Elder Seliger, and we would split up on each floor to tackle the bigwigs two at a time.

Getting past the secretaries, who always had a great opinion of their own self importance, was not too difficult -- if you didn’t mind a little play acting and bluffing.

“What do you want?” a secretary would ask me waspishly, eyeing my white shirt and name tag suspiciously.

“I have a very important message for your boss. One that I must deliver to him immediately.”

“Do you have an appointment with him?”

At this point I slowly slipped on my sunglasses and straightened my tie. Then looked around the room carefully before replying in a soft, confidential whisper.

“No. But he’ll be very happy to see me . . . if you know what I mean.”

I could see the secretary’s face change as she worked it out:  A young Caucasian male; white shirt; thin black tie; sunglasses, arrogant manner -- Buddha save us, it’s the CIA!   

“Please, sir, go right in! May I give him your name, please?”

“Don’t worry” I replied as I headed for the frosted glass door while pointing at my black plastic name tag, “he’ll know it very soon.”

This was in 1975, remember, at the height of the Vietnam War which was practically next door to Thailand, and the country was lousy with various intelligence operatives.

This was a great way to proselyte. We were inside, out of the tropical sun, in an air conditioned building with no stray dogs snapping at our heels. And the bosses were always extremely polite, although they never could understand why their secretaries ever let us in. And we never spent more than ten minutes with ‘em.

“These nacho grandes have the attention span of a two year old” Elder Seliger told me, with his slight Texas twang. “We just get in, leave a brief message and a pamphlet and see if they want us to come on over to teach ‘em.”

Polite they might be, but they never agreed to have us in their homes. Elder Seliger told me this was because most of ‘em didn’t live with their first wife anymore -- but had a mistress, a ‘small wife,’ squirreled away in some cozy little apartment down by the river.

Whenever business tracting began to pall, Elder Seliger would switch us over to government tracting. This was even more bizarre.

Our section of the city had several huge government compounds where clerks and other minor functionaries toiled away in huge, unairconditioned halls, each at their own modest teakwood desk, with a blotter, an adding machine (the kind you cranked to get an answer) and an IN and OUT basket awash with papers. These ballrooms for pen pushers and clock watchers were guarded by grim-visaged soldiers; Elder Seliger simply put on his sunglasses and waved an old University of Texas at Austin library card in front of their faces, and we were admitted without question. We tried to time our visits either early in the morning or after three in the afternoon, because every blessed one of these government clerks would clear off their desk promptly at noon, crawl on top, and go to sleep until three.

Elder Seliger decided that government pencil pushers would not appreciate the Family Home Evening approach, so he had me recite the Joseph Smith story at each desk -- whether the clerk was busy or not. As I got better with the language, I was able to make the story not only understandable, but exciting. When my monolog was judged fluent enough, Elder Seliger simply placed me in the middle of the clerk’s huge room and told me to let ‘er rip. I’d begin the story of Joseph Smith, the angel Moroni, and the gold plates, in a loud voice, and soon I’d have a crowd around me, whispering to each other that the farang with the big nose was telling a ghost story. Don’t ask me where their supervisors and managers were -- they didn’t seem to have any.

I was sorry to lose Elder Seliger as my companion after just two months. But companionships, at least in our mission,  never stayed the same for long. President Morris did not like companionships to get too cozy -- he wanted them to stay alert and to keep an eye on each other. There were too many cute young Thai girls joining the Church at that time, whose sole purpose was to bamboozle an American Elder into making a slip and then having to marry them and bring them back to America. Elder Seliger had to come to my rescue several times, when a cute young Thai would set her cap for me, and follow us around with a spoony look in her eyes. He would tell these fetching Thai sirens that I already had a girlfriend back home with the circus -- the bearded lady. Because I liked ‘em rough and hairy. That always did the trick . . .