Rough Stone Rolling

I love the moments when I bond with another brother after doing a Church service.

I was driving home from Stake Temple Night Friday, along with a brother who’s a month short of turning 80. It was a particularly good session and we went home with a little more wind in our sails. The brother, a sweet man who still teaches karate to families, has a tendency of either staying real quiet or running his sentences in a steady stream, disregarding punctuation or breathing in his delivery. And since he joined the Church late in his life, he tends to have at his disposal more colorful stories than a high councilman or, say, your garden variety longshoreman.

“Yeah, boy, I love the Church, but I really miss women. I need a woman. You know before I joined, I was having an affair with a married woman. Yeah, she was swell– Connie’s her name, man she had this wild red hair, y’know– and one day she says to me, ‘My husband’s being relocated to Vegas, so we’re buying a house over there. How about if you buy a house over there?’ And I said ‘Well sure why not,’ and so we’re living in the same neighborhood and just continuing like we always have. But then, you know, I’m visiting my brother in LA, and the missionaries knock on the door and I answer it and I’m thinking what they say’s pretty good so I get the lessons. And then I tell them I want to get baptized and they say I’ll have to stop drinking and sleeping with married women. And I’m thinkin’ to myself, that’s okay, I’ll just sleep with unmarried women. But then, you know, when I’m being interviewed they tell me I can’t sleep with any women except my wife, and I’m thinkin’ wait a minute do I really want this? But yeah I go ahead and do it and now I haven’t been with a woman for something like 20 years. I don’t want a woman my own age, y’know, she’s gotta be younger. Like when I moved into the ward I saw this one woman and I’m askin’ Mike, ‘Hey, who’s that? She’s pretty good-lookin'’ and he says, ‘Hey man, that’s the bishop’s wife’ and I’m all, Oh shoot, just my luck, y’know? I miss bourbon, too. Wild Turkey…”

I’m just grateful no one else was in the car trying to change the subject. Temple cab confessions, man, pearls o’ wisdom. And I’m just driving the car, going, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh…”

Then he says, “How about you?” Playing like I don’t know what he means, I volunteer that I used to like Jack Daniels. “Another bourbon man! I didn’t know that about you, Dave, put ‘er there. Gee, yeah, you like Wild Turkey too? How about women?” “Um… I joined the church too young. I was a virgin when I got married.” “Aw, that’s great, I mean it, I’m jealous. ‘Cause I just slept around way too much y’know, I mean what was to stop me?”

Indeed, what was to stop him. Certainly not me. So as the lights of the temple continued to shrink in my rear view mirror, I was going home with Willie Nelson and all the girls he loved before. Should I have stopped his debauchery discourse? I didn’t think so, not at the time. Afterward I second-guessed myself, of course, but while driving down the freeway that night, listening to this seasoned, lonely brother who gave up all his favorite pleasures for the Lord, I felt it was fine for him to share it– albeit enthusiastically– as a way to let me know how much he loved the Lord.

Since I’ve been LDS I’ve come across those who would have me believe because I’ve abandoned certain pleasures when I converted, I shouldn’t like them anymore. Well, liking and being afflicted with temptations of them are two different things in my book. As far as I know I still like bourbon and I still like coffee. I just don’t partake of them anymore because I’ve covenanted not to. In fact, since it is just casual fondness for these things and not wholesale allurement, I count it as a credit to me to hold fast to my convictions. If it was planted in my heart to despise these things, that wouldn’t be much of an exercise in faith.

In the meantime, I’m not sure what impresses me the most: That this guy would tell me of his wild escapades, that he easily dropped all for the Church or that he bought a house in Vegas just to keep dating Connie the Wild Married Redhead.