The Jehovah's Witnesses came to our door last week. At least that's who Kim says they were (she's good at discerning sects). I spied them first from our upstairs bedroom window. I got pretty excited about it.
They came at a moment when I felt like I was running out of Mommy #2 material. And then here they were, two women striding toward us in beige trench coats. Heaven sent.
I knew the moment their sedan drove up, and when they got out with those heavy leather satchels… well that cinched it.
Kim has a history of delighting me with how she handles people witnessing at our door. "Witnessing" is a term I didn't know before I met her. (It's the act of working to "save" someone and make them "born again.")
As a child, Kim had quotas to fill. Taught to use wordless books, she saved people at malls with four solid-color pages—gold for the streets of Heaven, black for sin and damnation, red for the blood of Christ, and white for salvation. At school and in town, she found easy targets to bring home for Wednesday night Bible study. It makes her wince now to talk about those "soft marks"—the vulnerable kids who craved attention and accepted it from anyone for any purpose. "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man…" say the Jesuits, confident in the power of early indoctrination. But, alas, by eight Kim reports she was just going through the motions. (To bide time, however, she did manage to save her math teacher.)
At the door, a matronly Jehovah's Witness beamed with confidence. "This is the season where people talk of peace and goodwill among men!" she began, tightening her coat belt. "Isn't that something you'd like to see?"
Kim smiled buoyantly, "Why yes, yes it is!"
Once in college and released from the church, Kim self-imposed her own form of atonement: directing the campus Big Brother/Big Sister program. Later she volunteered with a women's crisis hotline (and met me, her true-love). Today her field is rural youth development.
"I'm just not sure your peacemakers are willing to sit at the same table as my peacemakers," she continued.
Watching her, I started to feel giddy. I recalled the time when, fifteen years earlier, we'd put our house up for rent and attracted an array of colorful applicants. Everyone from hemp activists to a fundamentalist looking to "plant" a church came by for a tour. The hemp people complained our property lacked "canopy" for their growing operation; the fundamentalist admired our wild peppermint—admired it with a particular fervor.
"It was an object lesson!" Kim explained.
"A what?" I had no idea what she was talking about.
"An object lesson! He picked a mint leaf and started in on how intricate, beautiful, even miraculous it was! You know, as in WHO could have created such a thing?!'"
She was giggling then, and wiping her eyes with pleasure. In a few weeks we would be moving to Boston so she could attend graduate school in public policy. I was cooking dinner and had missed this exchange outside with the church planter, and now I sorely regretted it because I knew how it had ended. She loved to reel them in. She'd let them go a long, long time, let them get really hopeful, and then reply, "Why yes indeed I HAVE found true happiness… ever since coming out as a lesbian!"
Okay, admittedly, this was her strategy when we were much younger, in our twenties, still flush with new-adult autonomy and gay liberation. Now, at 43, she has less time, patience, or need to say more than "no thanks." Indeed, unless there's a youngster at our door, a 'tween or young adult, she turns them away as she would any invasive telemarketer. Last year, however, the Jehovah's Witnesses included a young man in an ill-fitting dark suit. I don’t know exactly what she said, but I've learned her new priorities: to make eye-contact and let the young ones know there is life after all of this, a life worth living, and right here on earth.
And so I shouldn't have been surprised when, this past September, we were in Santa Fe and at the same moment that I found myself agreeing to shake some Palm fronds and repeat Hebrew for a Lubavitcher who'd guessed I was Jewish (I was with Anakin and it seemed like a nice opportunity to learn about Sukkot), that Kim was on the other side of the Plaza advising two proselytizing Catholic children on how best to rid themselves of their pamphlets. "Tell them you went into restaurants" she recommended. "Tell them you went table to table and so now they're all gone."
As she tells it, the ten-year-old boy gave her his rapt attention. "But don’t actually go into restaurants?" he clarified, somewhat breathless.
"Right," she confirmed (her look undoubtedly conveying her personal experience with the matter). "Give me the rest of your stuff and you're off the hook!" (Which they did without hesitation.)
So last week, before the Jehovah's Witnesses actually reached for our door knob, desperate for this material, I begged Kim, "Oh, do make it good!" And she smiled at me. After all, the holidays were upon us; she'd been mixing cookies; she was feeling relaxed, playful even.
But there was no awkward teenager among them. And the two women at our door exuded confidence and energy.
And so did Kim.
In hindsight, I have no regrets. If it had gone on, I see now it would have been a collision of super powers. Because, pivoting with the moment, with the information fed her senses by their vocabulary, their manners, their dress, she was not headed for the "gay reveal." They came out swinging, asking if we felt our community and world were headed for Joy and Good Tidings.
This was headed for politics.
Just then, however, I spied our holiday cards recently printed with our family picture taken on a ridge above Santa Fe. Acting on impulse, I grabbed one and pushed by Kim to pass it out our snowy screen door. "Please take it," I said. "Happy holidays. This is our family. We are very proud."
Awkward pleasantries ensued, and then the women were gone. I stood flush with pleasure, tail wagging, only to find Kim's smile deflated.
She shook her head slowly, her eyes saying it all ("light weight!") Aloud she leveled me, "Congrats. Nice going. We're spending the year pinned to their wall getting prayed for. All three of us. On their wall. All year."
Drooping, I swallowed. Hard. "I don’t care," I retorted, weakly.
But I saw that her moment had been lost. How I had invited her to be my knight-in-shining-armor only to come galloping in on my own three-legged donkey.
Then, with the wisdom of the innocent, I pointed out, "We're on their wall reminding them of a happy gay family who turned them on their heels."
Her hands went slack. Her jaw and eyes softened.
"Next time," I reassured her, "I swear, they're all yours."
They came at a moment when I felt like I was running out of Mommy #2 material. And then here they were, two women striding toward us in beige trench coats. Heaven sent.
I knew the moment their sedan drove up, and when they got out with those heavy leather satchels… well that cinched it.
Kim has a history of delighting me with how she handles people witnessing at our door. "Witnessing" is a term I didn't know before I met her. (It's the act of working to "save" someone and make them "born again.")
As a child, Kim had quotas to fill. Taught to use wordless books, she saved people at malls with four solid-color pages—gold for the streets of Heaven, black for sin and damnation, red for the blood of Christ, and white for salvation. At school and in town, she found easy targets to bring home for Wednesday night Bible study. It makes her wince now to talk about those "soft marks"—the vulnerable kids who craved attention and accepted it from anyone for any purpose. "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man…" say the Jesuits, confident in the power of early indoctrination. But, alas, by eight Kim reports she was just going through the motions. (To bide time, however, she did manage to save her math teacher.)
At the door, a matronly Jehovah's Witness beamed with confidence. "This is the season where people talk of peace and goodwill among men!" she began, tightening her coat belt. "Isn't that something you'd like to see?"
Kim smiled buoyantly, "Why yes, yes it is!"
Once in college and released from the church, Kim self-imposed her own form of atonement: directing the campus Big Brother/Big Sister program. Later she volunteered with a women's crisis hotline (and met me, her true-love). Today her field is rural youth development.
"I'm just not sure your peacemakers are willing to sit at the same table as my peacemakers," she continued.
Watching her, I started to feel giddy. I recalled the time when, fifteen years earlier, we'd put our house up for rent and attracted an array of colorful applicants. Everyone from hemp activists to a fundamentalist looking to "plant" a church came by for a tour. The hemp people complained our property lacked "canopy" for their growing operation; the fundamentalist admired our wild peppermint—admired it with a particular fervor.
"It was an object lesson!" Kim explained.
"A what?" I had no idea what she was talking about.
"An object lesson! He picked a mint leaf and started in on how intricate, beautiful, even miraculous it was! You know, as in WHO could have created such a thing?!'"
She was giggling then, and wiping her eyes with pleasure. In a few weeks we would be moving to Boston so she could attend graduate school in public policy. I was cooking dinner and had missed this exchange outside with the church planter, and now I sorely regretted it because I knew how it had ended. She loved to reel them in. She'd let them go a long, long time, let them get really hopeful, and then reply, "Why yes indeed I HAVE found true happiness… ever since coming out as a lesbian!"
Okay, admittedly, this was her strategy when we were much younger, in our twenties, still flush with new-adult autonomy and gay liberation. Now, at 43, she has less time, patience, or need to say more than "no thanks." Indeed, unless there's a youngster at our door, a 'tween or young adult, she turns them away as she would any invasive telemarketer. Last year, however, the Jehovah's Witnesses included a young man in an ill-fitting dark suit. I don’t know exactly what she said, but I've learned her new priorities: to make eye-contact and let the young ones know there is life after all of this, a life worth living, and right here on earth.
And so I shouldn't have been surprised when, this past September, we were in Santa Fe and at the same moment that I found myself agreeing to shake some Palm fronds and repeat Hebrew for a Lubavitcher who'd guessed I was Jewish (I was with Anakin and it seemed like a nice opportunity to learn about Sukkot), that Kim was on the other side of the Plaza advising two proselytizing Catholic children on how best to rid themselves of their pamphlets. "Tell them you went into restaurants" she recommended. "Tell them you went table to table and so now they're all gone."
As she tells it, the ten-year-old boy gave her his rapt attention. "But don’t actually go into restaurants?" he clarified, somewhat breathless.
"Right," she confirmed (her look undoubtedly conveying her personal experience with the matter). "Give me the rest of your stuff and you're off the hook!" (Which they did without hesitation.)
So last week, before the Jehovah's Witnesses actually reached for our door knob, desperate for this material, I begged Kim, "Oh, do make it good!" And she smiled at me. After all, the holidays were upon us; she'd been mixing cookies; she was feeling relaxed, playful even.
But there was no awkward teenager among them. And the two women at our door exuded confidence and energy.
And so did Kim.
In hindsight, I have no regrets. If it had gone on, I see now it would have been a collision of super powers. Because, pivoting with the moment, with the information fed her senses by their vocabulary, their manners, their dress, she was not headed for the "gay reveal." They came out swinging, asking if we felt our community and world were headed for Joy and Good Tidings.
This was headed for politics.
Just then, however, I spied our holiday cards recently printed with our family picture taken on a ridge above Santa Fe. Acting on impulse, I grabbed one and pushed by Kim to pass it out our snowy screen door. "Please take it," I said. "Happy holidays. This is our family. We are very proud."
Awkward pleasantries ensued, and then the women were gone. I stood flush with pleasure, tail wagging, only to find Kim's smile deflated.
She shook her head slowly, her eyes saying it all ("light weight!") Aloud she leveled me, "Congrats. Nice going. We're spending the year pinned to their wall getting prayed for. All three of us. On their wall. All year."
Drooping, I swallowed. Hard. "I don’t care," I retorted, weakly.
But I saw that her moment had been lost. How I had invited her to be my knight-in-shining-armor only to come galloping in on my own three-legged donkey.
Then, with the wisdom of the innocent, I pointed out, "We're on their wall reminding them of a happy gay family who turned them on their heels."
Her hands went slack. Her jaw and eyes softened.
"Next time," I reassured her, "I swear, they're all yours."
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