Tag Archives: missionary

Let’s Save Us Some Souls!

(A re-post -I went looking for my ‘missionary’ post to link to, and couldn’t find it. Turns out I’d posted it only on my seldom-visited Apache Adventures blog. So without apology, I thought I’d also post it here).

The new preacherman at the Christian Church of Apache Oklahoma, looked me up after he’d been in town a while and invited me over to his place. Turns out he was interested in becoming a mission-nary to Africa and wanted to meet one of the real-deal Africans he’d heard and read so much about. Maybe suss out just how much we needed saving?

A HUGE man, six feet and nine inches tall, Ron Elr*ck wore a string tie, a 10 gallon stetson and cowboy boots, making him damn near eight feet tall fully dressed as he stooped through doors and bent down to shake people’s hands. I met his tiny little wife who was seemingly half his height, and two lil daughters. He was an ex-Canadian Mountie and a picture on his mantelpiece showed him towering over John Wayne, when Wayne was in Canada to film a movie.

Soon he invited me to join him on a ‘men’s retreat’ to “God’s Forty Acres” in NE Oklahoma (the yanks are way ahead of Angus Buchan in this “get away from the wife and come back and tell her you’re the boss” shit. I mean, this was 1973!).

– me – – Ron –

I had made it known from my arrival in Apache that I would join anybody and go anywhere to see the state (and get out of school – I mean I’d already DONE matric!). So we hopped into his muddy pinky-brown wagon with ‘wood’ paneling down the sides – it looked a bit like the ’53 Buick Roadmaster in the picture above, or this Chev Brookwood maybe?

We roared off from Caddo county heading north-east, bypassing Oklahoma City and Tulsa to somewhere near Broken Arrow or Cherokee county  – towards the Arkansas border, anyway. Me n Ron driving like Thelma and Louise. Hey, you think they based the 1991 movie on us? We should get royalties, surely?

– me – – Ron –

Non-stop monologue on the way. He didn’t need any answers, I just had to nod him yes and he could talk uninterrupted for hours on end. At the retreat there were hundreds of men & boys just like him, all fired up for the Lawd, bellowing the Retreat Song at the drop of a hat:
 ♫“In Gahd’s Fordy Yacres . . !!”♫ We musta sang it 400 times in that weekend. If I was God I’d have done some smiting.

We left at last and headed back, wafting along like on a mattress in that long slap wagon, when Ron suddenly needed an answer:
Had I ever seen a porno movie? WHAT? I hadn’t? Amazing! Well, jeez, I mean goodness, he felt it as sort of like a DUTY to enlighten me and reveal to me just how evil and degraded these movies could be.

– I remember less soap bubbles –

So we detoured into Tulsa. Maybe he regarded it as practice for the mission-nary work he was wanting to do among us Africans? We sat through a skin flick in a seedy movie house. It was the most skin ‘n hair ‘n pelvis ‘n organs this 18yr old boykie from the Vrystaat had seen to date so it was, after all, educational. Thin plot, though.

I suppose you could say I got saved and damned all on one weekend.

~~~oo0oo~~~
footnote:
Ron did get to Africa as a mission-nary. He was posted to Jo-hannesburg. Lotsa ‘sinners’ in Jo-hannesburg, I suppose. I’m just not sure they need ‘saving’ by a Canadian Mountie.

I’m a Missionary

I regard myself as a missionary. It’s an important job. There are a lot of people who need help and I – like the man from head office – am here to help them.

Take my mate JonDinDin and his eating habits. Weird. He made a porridge for me once and when I had finished picking twigs, bark, seed husks and I think even a few pebbles from my teeth, I politely asked him, ‘What The Actual Fuck?’ Roughage, he said. Fibre. Gives you moral fibre, makes you rugged. I explained health food to him and gave him some solid dietary tips. You know what food is good for you if it tastes lekker. If it tastes really REALLY good it’s health food: Mental Health. And that’s the important health, right? Mental Health. Also drinking. Eight glasses of water a day is for elephants after a drought. Drink when you’re thirsty, and sometimes drink stuff that makes you feel witty, clever and like you can dance like Nureyev. I don’t think he thanked me. Weird.

Take Chas and his perseveration. Someone has to be there for him. I say to him, Chas, if you have paddled from Hella Hella to Goodenough’s weir, you have paddled from Hella Hella to Goodenough’s weir. You’ve done it. You do not have to do it fifty times. Fifty three, he says.

I say to Allie, Allie, you have walked the Wild Coast. You have been there, done that. Also, if you must swim, there are lots of places you can swim with zero sharks in the water. I introduce a new concept for your consideration: Shark-Free Water.

But do they lissen!?

What made me think of my mission in life was this NEW Gary Larson cartoon. Yes, the wonderful news is that Gary Larson is telling the truth about life again! He stopped doing his The Far Side cartoons in 1995 but recently he started again! Not with pen and ink now, but on a tablet. Here’s the one that got me going:

– isn’t Gary Larson awesome! Domestic dogs preaching like mormons or jehovah’s witnesses!! – – telling lies to dogs living the simple, truthful, real life! –

~~~oo0oo~~~

I went on a mission with a missionary once. Got saved and damned . . .