Hey, Val! What's Your Mom Been Up to Lately?

Funny you should ask, all telepathically like that.

Last week Mom had a visitor. Make that visitorS, lest you jump to the conclusion that it was her neighbor from across the road. The one she would not take food to when a tree fell across his driveway and he couldn't get his car out a while back. Her excuse being, "Val, he HAS a wife!"

Nope. The visitors pulled into her driveway (!!!) with a silver car. Mom only knew because she was sitting at her table downstairs, writing out bills, with the shades open on the front windows. "Oh, dear!" she thought. "Who can this be, coming to my house? I really don't want to talk to anybody." Then she did what any bona fide Thevictorian would have done, and hid. She told me all about it one morning on our 6:00 a.m. phone call.

"I went to the window and looked out. There were two of them in the car. It was the Jehovah's Witness ladies. I crouched down and went over to the downstairs bathroom. I didn't turn the light on. I heard them ringing my doorbell. I thought, 'How many times are they going to ring that bell?' But they only rang it twice."

"Did you close the bathroom door?"

"Yeeessss. Just in case."

"How did you know when they were gone?"

"Well, every now and then I stuck my head out of the bathroom to see if I could see their car driving down the road. But I couldn't."

"What would you have done if they were looking in your windows when you peeped out?"

"Oh, I don't know! That would have been terrible!"

"So when did you come out?"

"I crept along the wall, all bent over, until I got to the window. I raised my head just enough for my eyes to be over the windowsill, and I saw that they were backing out the driveway. I ducked down and went back to the bathroom for a few minutes."

"You used to let them in and talk to them. I remember from when I was in high school. [Where I was valedictorian, everybody remember?] I think they even told you that they really had to get going."

"Well, it's always the same ladies. They're very nice. I used to feel so bad. They would take off their shoes when they came in the door. And there I'd be with my muddy old tennis shoes..."

"I don't really think that's a custom of the Jehovah's Witnesses. The kids in my class at school never did that."

"No. But they were being polite."

"Probably because you sat down with them in the living room, where no people had ever gone before, and they thought it was formal sitting room reserved for dignitaries. What did they tell you, anyway?"

"Oh, they always had their little magazine with a story in it, and they would read the story, and then quote some Bible verses that went along with it. We would talk for a while. Then I would tell them I was sorry, but I wasn't interested just now, and give them a dollar or two. I remember one time, they sent a little girl, well, she must have been about twenty, and she thanked me and thanked me for those two dollars."

"Well, she must have pegged you for somebody who would some day donate five dollars to the Extraordinary Dance."

"I just didn't want to talk to them last week. I think I might start giving them handouts from my church. They say that's how to get rid of them. That if you do that, they won't come back."

"They're not like vampires with garlic. Don't you ever get the Mormon boys on bicycles? We always got them when we lived in town."

"No. What did you tell them?"

"We didn't give them money. We just told them we weren't interested, and that they were good representatives, so polite, and dressed in shirts and ties. But we didn't hide from them. After a while we just said we had things to do."

"They never came out here."

"Maybe they knew it was Jehovah's Witness territory."

"Do you think so?"

"No. But I know what you can do next time. Tell those ladies that you think your neighbor across the street would like to meet them. Since he's new around here."

"Oh! I think they were headed that direction when they backed out of my driveway!"

"There you go! Without even trying, you have hooked up people who need each other."

"I don't know about that. I'm just glad I avoided them this time."

You'd think Mom would welcome somebody to talk to. Maybe she felt obligated to offer them some slaw. She's on her last container, you know. And she won't get gypped again.