Kelly over there to the Mocha Momma blog
tagged me with a meme.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of meme tagging but I guess I'm just not in the mood to be anti-social. Maybe I'm just feeling the love from the blogosphere and I wanna give a little back. Get I get an amen?

Around our house, LDS General Conference has become and excuse for Donna to hole up in her craft room and scrapbook with a friend. For them, the weekend is meant to be free of spouses and children. An orgy of die-cuts and heart-shaped punches, not to be interrupted by the trivial goings-on of the rest of us.

I, for one, am happy to oblige. The girls and I sit around burping and farting in our pajamas with our hair uncombed and bodies unwashed. We eat anything that can be microwaved or eaten raw. After all, we wouldn't want to leave any dirty laundry or dishes for Donna to deal with once the post-Conference hangover hits on Monday.

The downside is the all-day inundation of hardline Mormon doctrine. The upside is, it's generally the same droned out nonsense we've been hearing for years from them so most of it goes largely ignored. It becomes background noise. Like Coldplay. Every song sounds the same.

"Hello?"

"Hey, this is Pete."

"Hey, Pete. Can I call you back? I'm training a horse."

...read the rest...

I'll be spending this weekend camping and hiking in southern Utah with friends and family. Our frequent trips to the great National and State Parks always conjure the memory of a trip we took a few years ago with some very good, very evangelical Christian friends.

Dave and I stood overlooking the massive canyon carved from the rock by the Colorado River at Dead Horse Point. Dave read from an etched-metal sign to his young daughter. "This canyon was formed from millions of years of erosion by the swift and muddy water of the great river..." He was then quick to teach the youngster that the sign was, in fact, incorrect. "Actually, this canyon was formed only thousands of years ago when God flooded the Earth at the time of Noah. The Earth is not even millions of years old, as we know from reading the Bible."

"Wow," I thought, "he's gonna have some 'splainin' to do when we get to the dinosaur footprints this afternoon."

Though I mentioned this, very briefly, in passing the other day, it is weird enough to kick off the Marathon of Weird.

I can speak backwards. One friend and I do it so fluently that we regularly slip in and out of backspeak without noticing. We started doing it sometime around 1987 or so.

This all started when a few of us got the bright idea that we wanted to be able to talk to each other about girls without the girls in our Mormon ward knowing what we were saying. It doesn't take much thinking to understand now why I never developed any skill for speaking to women in a way that they could understand.

There's an old set of my scriptures sitting on the end table next to the couch in the family room of my grandparent's vacation home. I'm not sure exactly how they ended up there but last time Donna, the kids and I were up there I saw them sitting there with my full name stamped in gilded letters on the leather cover.

My grandmother had given them to me as a gift when I started high school. The pages are worn and heavily marked. I had once toted this book to and from school every day and to church every Sunday.

One Sunday, I visited the LDS ward I lived in before high school. As my friend Aaron, who still lived in the ward, and I waited for Priesthood meeting to start, Aaron took my scriptures and jotted a note on the inside cover. He then took a roll of clear tape from his jacket pocket and stuck a piece over his inscription, preserving the words for eternity.

I got an email from my old friend Wally over the weekend. Apparently a friend of his had seen the post I wrote about playing hooky a few weeks ago and had passed along a link.

Wally's email was warm and nice. I felt a tiny bit bad about outing him and Sue Geertsen publicly like I did and expected him to say something about it. He didn't. I obviously didn't feel enough guilt to keep me from mentioning it again just now either. I'm sure if I ever get an email from her it will be less forgiving.

Wally reminded me of some very good times I had that summer. He brought me up to date on some of the other missionaries I haven't seen in years. Wally also told me that a spark had been ignited in him despite what some people would call troubles he had that year.