Fearsome Mormon missionaries revealed to be pimply-faced dweebs

So, our “neigh­bor­hood,” sand­wiched as it is between the biggest (and “bestest,” I am told by par­ents of teenagers) mall in Omaha and two large apart­ment com­plexes, gets buzzed by Mor­mon mis­sion­ar­ies on a pretty reg­u­lar basis. We think there might be a Mor­mon safe­house¹ up the street, but we’re not sure.

In any case, we live in fear of the uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tion that might arise should an earnest Mor­mon cou­ple (Ha ha. No, really, I’m just kid­ding. I’m sure they call them part­ners… Ha! I kid again!) ring our door­bell. What would we say, once we calmed our doorbell-frenzied Poo­dle? Would we be polite? Would we gib­ber and spit and carry on about Dun­geons and Drag­ons, hop­ing to scare them away permanently?

I just don’t know.

Any­way, tonight, we spied two young men, impec­ca­bly dressed, walk­ing up our street. “There are Mor­mons out there,” Sweetie offered up. We watched them sur­rep­ti­tiously from the upstairs win­dows, as they rang the door­bell of the house across the street. Nobody came to the door, but they stood there like good Sol­diers for a long while. Finally they moved on up the way. I took the oppor­tu­nity to leash up the feral Poo­dle and go hunt us some Mor­mon boys.

It took me a while to find them (luck­ily for us, our lit­tle slice of res­i­den­tial Omaha is nes­tled between the afore­men­tioned com­mer­cial prop­er­ties and two large roads (the kind your Mother wouldn’t let you cross on your own until you were 25). It is a cul-de-sac heaven wherein no road leads any­where, and all paths loop back on them­selves. When we finally crossed their path, I was a bit taken aback. These fear­some mis­sion­ar­ies, were, in fact, two pim­ply dweebs. Not more than four­teen or fif­teen, one was pudgy and crew-cut, the leader, and the other was thin and sal­low, with his back­pack cinched tight over chest and stom­ach. They smiled ner­vously at my tooth­some dog, and man­aged a friendly “Hello” as we swept past. Or maybe they were smil­ing ner­vously at me, won­der­ing why I was exam­in­ing them so closely.

I said “Hi” in turn and promptly began to stalk them.

You have to under­stand how easy this is in our neigh­bor­hood. All you really have to do is hang out at the nexus inter­sec­tion, and even­tu­ally every­one will cross your path. Plus, we have a per­pet­u­ally empty field (a year-old sign declares that a cheer­lead­ing acces­sories store will be built there), and an inter­mit­tently occu­pied retail prop­erty (for­merly a Generic Chi­nese Buf­fet, for­merly a Godfather’s Lounge, serv­ing alco­hol and pizza)… clear sight­lines for a half mile or so.

Our boys, walk­ing slowly and mak­ing lit­tle eye con­tact, had clearly just been doing the min­i­mum required. They’d pounded the pave­ment, but appeared to have vis­ited only those homes that looked unlikely to have ten­ants. But now it seemed they had found a tar­get for their con­vic­tions. A cute, twenty-something woman walk­ing her Yorkie. You could see it in the way they sud­denly stood up straighter, walked faster, and seemed to have dis­cov­ered some kind of spe­cial pur­pose.²

She took her Yorkie to the empty proto-cheerleading field. They saun­tered along the side­walk next to it, hop­ing to dis­cuss Jesus with… the weeds? Some­body whizzing by in a pickup? Even­tu­ally they couldn’t loi­ter any more and still be seemly, so they kept on going up to the aban­doned Chi­nese Liquor Bar. Cute-but-probably-concerned girl took a right turn along the property’s park­ing lot, when lo! The mis­sion boys came back, not exactly trot­ting, but clearly aware their quarry had given them the slip.

Turn­ing the cor­ner into the park­ing lot, they found her Right There, wait­ing in ambush, and they kind of nod­ded and smiled and walked past her. She turned left and started to put some dis­tance between them, when the leader boy turned back and said some­thing (I don’t know what, since my sight­line was clear but I was a long way away) and she stopped. They held some sort of stilted con­ver­sa­tion for thirty sec­onds, at which point she hur­ried away. The other boy, the thin, pim­ply, shy one, raised his hand in farewell, as if see­ing the lovely gov­erness off at the end of a long, Pla­tonic, British tele­vi­sion show, her train pulling out of the sta­tion slowly, but inex­orably, in a cloud of steam.

Then, slumped and trudg­ing, they went on their way.

I took the furry fury home, think­ing to myself, Why, these Mor­mons are peo­ple too. Hor­mone dri­ven, break-out suf­fer­ing, shy, awk­ward, kids on a mis­sion from God.³ I sure hope our “Dean for Pres­i­dent” bumper sticker con­tin­ues to keep them out of our driveway.