The World’s Strongest Librarian

  Not everyone has a calling, because the decision to call someone rests on the answers that a church leader receives during prayer. So maybe you’d make a great teacher, but if you never flash into someone’s head while he’s trying to figure out the best person to fill that slot in Sunday school, your number might never come up.

  You can probably see how this could be exploited. Even an organization with God at the helm is still run by people. Fallible people bring their personalities and foibles and flaws with them when they agree to serve. If you get a calling that puts you in close and frequent proximity to someone who you find about as enjoyable to be around as an outhouse, it doesn’t mean that you now love that person. And if you were in a position to assign callings to ward members, a weaker (read: normal) person might be hesitant to give someone they didn’t like a calling that meant seeing that person more often.

  You can always say no when you’re called, although if you believe your selection is inspired, it’s hard to say, “Sorry, tell omniscient God I just can’t right now. I don’t think he knows.” When it’s time for you to be released from a calling—because your circumstances make it impossible to continue, or someone receives inspiration that you’re done—you’re done. That calling goes to someone else and becomes his responsibility.

  As a retention tool, callings make sense. A calling helps new converts stay active. After the euphoric intensity of spiritual conversion—not unlike what the ancient Greeks called “being consumed by a ball of fire”—begins to fade, they have a reason to be there. They’re not just a face in the crowd; they’re people without whom those specific, necessary tasks will not get done.

  Immediately post-conversion, my dad was called to teach the Sunbeams class, which is ages three to four. On his second Sunday in his new calling, the person monitoring the halls during classes (another calling) heard a ruckus coming from his room. Upon entering, he found my dad asleep on the floor. The children had removed a screen from the window. Half of them were playing in the parking lot.

  The bishop quickly released Dad from his calling.

  My mom was always serving, often by sitting in more meetings than she wanted to, although she might not have admitted it. She almost always had multiple callings, despite having young children and despite having assignments that were time-intensive, such as leading the Young Women’s organization. When the calls came, she accepted them.

  My dad was faithful enough so that my mom wouldn’t regret marrying him, but if the Sunbeam incident was any indicator, his priorities swung more toward naps than pious service. My siblings and I had enough faith in our parents to obey them and accept what they said about the grand scheme of things, meaning the Plan of Salvation.

  The Plan was the doctrine of Everything Happens for a Reason. We came to earth because we sided with Jesus in the preexistence, unlike the poor bastards who chose Satan and landed in Hell before they even got to visit earth. Once here, we were tempted and tried and given opportunities to prove that we could be faithful and worthy of returning to Heaven. When something bad happened, it was so that we could show that we could react wisely to difficulties. If something good happened, it was so that we could have a chance to express our gratitude to a benevolent God. There was no guesswork for us, no questions about the Meaning of Life, no existential dread, etc. The Plan boiled down to “do more good things than bad things, repent of the bad things, you’ll be rewarded.” We liked my dad’s definition better: “This is the church of Don’t Be a Dick.”

  Now pass the Otter Pops.

  My mom was so faithful it was like she was playing a different sport. She knew that we were walking the path back to glory. But we all felt like we were heading in the same direction, together. The church put us together constantly, and this is still miraculous to me: Whether or not following the doctrine meant that we’d be together in Heaven, the family-centric aspects of the gospel led to a family that I wanted to spend eternity with.

  Every Monday night we had family home evening. This was exactly what it sounds like: time set aside to be together. We played games, told jokes, went to the movies, occasionally had scripture study…we did what we wanted and we did it together. I’d guess that I spent more time sitting with my family, laughing and talking and being together than any kid I knew. And if we didn’t spend time together, at least before we all became teenagers and had our own social circles, it was weird. A day without us laughing at the dinner table was abnormal.

  Megan is four years younger than I am, Kyle came four years after Megan, and Lindsey three years after that. I didn’t understand that not everyone loved to be with their siblings, or their parents, or God forbid, even their children. Hell, my dad didn’t even always know where his family members lived, let alone when he’d see them next.

  I remember a weekend when my dad was going to take us all fishing and he told us that we could each bring one friend. We chose each other. At Hidden Lake we fished and played and swam and, when the sun set, we said a blessing over the fish we’d caught. It was the most natural thing in the world.

  We always blessed the food when we ate and my dad snuck jokes into the prayers. His love for fly-fishing was profound, and without fail, every time we’d sit down to eat the fish he’d caught, he’d ask God to please make “the bounty provided by my fly-rod expertise to be even more delicious because of the skilled hands that caught it.”

  We always had family prayer before we slept. In private, I struggled. I knelt and did my best to feel pious and connected to the God who watched me, knew my name, saw everything I did, and knew my thoughts. My Sunday school teachers said, “Just talk to him like you would to a friend. Saying your prayers is just checking in and telling someone about your day.”

  So I chatted it up with this all-powerful deity. I cut the fingers off my mom’s Isotoner glove so that I could start an arm wrestling club. I read two Beverly Cleary books today. I ate some candy. I put a frog on a big leaf and watched it float away down at the creek. Was this interesting to anyone but me? The thought of not being the center of my own universe was impossible, but the thought that it mattered to anyone not living in my house didn’t resonate.

  My teachers taught me to tell God the sins I’d committed during the day and ask for forgiveness. Dear God, I ate some grapes out of the produce section at the supermarket. When Mom dropped me and Greg off to go swimming, he asked me if I wanted to swear and we yelled “Shit!” every time we went off the diving board. Oh, and I ate a bunch of candy bars out of Aunt Sue’s Snack Shack business, the one she drives over to the high school during lunch period. During a game of Four Square I kicked the ball and it hit Kelly in the butt. She kicked me and threw me down and while we were wrestling I decided that I wanted to spend more time wrestling with girls. P.S. I’m sorry and I’ll never, ever do any of it again.

  At night I made the gravest promises while praying; the conviction dissolved before breakfast.

  I was also supposed to ask God questions. This was more interesting. I had plenty of questions, and answers were like candy. I’d been taught that prayers were answered by a feeling of a “burning in the bosom,” “hearing the still, small voice,” or feelings of clarity and assurance. But my emotions got tugged around by everything. It was easy to “feel” the answers I wanted as a distractible kid.

  I remember my parents taking me to the first Land Before Time movie, and especially the scene where the shrill little dinosaurs made it to the Great Valley. The music swelled; they’d come so far and the hair on my neck stood on end and my eyes watered. It was how I felt when Luke Skywalker was trying to save Darth Vader after he threw the emperor off the walkway and the saddest music ever played in the background. I cried at the end of Terminator 2 when Arnold gave the thumbs-up while lowering himself into the molten metal (Come on! A machine learned the value of human life!). I felt something similar when I finished Super Mario Bros. 2 on the original Nintendo. Good grief, if my mom bought Pop-Tarts it felt like a sacred experience. But praye
r didn’t give me that undeniable, visceral reaction. I never experienced anything unequivocally divine or had sensations that I couldn’t associate with anything else. If I felt something during prayer, it was as likely because I was humming the soundtrack to The Land Before Time as it was because a Supreme Being was bridging the gaps in my understanding.

  I never found answers in silence. Of course, sitting still and listening for inspiration was challenging with the constant interruptions of my blinking eyes and facial contortions.

  Halfway through my fourth-grade year my parents told us we were moving to Spring Creek, Nevada. My dad had taken a job at a Nevada gold mine.

  When I asked why we were moving, they said it was a great opportunity for my dad and that they “felt good about it” after praying on it. If they thought they had divine support behind the move, how could I argue? I tried, though. Oh, I tried.

  I didn’t want to leave my friends. I didn’t want to go to a new school full of kids who didn’t know me.

  So I asked God if we should move. I tried to stay very still. I squinted and listened and frowned and sent my mind into the cosmos to plead with whoever was there. After a couple of minutes I knew I’d received an answer. I felt better when I was done praying than before I’d started. If that wasn’t a sign, what was? What a relief!

  “Mom, Dad, I prayed and we aren’t supposed to move,” I said. Stalemate! Two parties ask the same question; each receives a different answer. Who is right? Who can prove that they received enlightenment? The child’s prayer is worth as much as anyone’s, yes?

  No.

  We moved to Spring Creek, an ugly little clump of brown nothing with sagebrush for hair, lurking eight miles outside of Elko. We moved, I started school, and I was miserable…for about twenty-four hours.

  On my first day at school I was walking the perimeter of the playground at recess. A couple of hours earlier I’d been introduced to the class, who didn’t seem interested in me. That was a relief. But then a girl named Heather, sitting behind me, had tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, half hoping for a smile or some other sign that I was more than a wretched sub-creature. Instead, she blinked her eyes and touched her nose with her upper lip. “Your head is too big,” she said. In fairness, she was probably right. Until I was about twenty-five, I was rail thin and had a big head. She probably thought I looked like a big toddler.

  Moab was a million miles away. I couldn’t keep my face still. The wind blew just to bother me and the happy sounds of the recess-in-progress were excruciating.

  Oh please oh please, please help me! my mind cried.

  “Hey!”

  I kept walking.

  “Hey, Josh!”

  I’d read enough books to know about mirages, but I didn’t know if one could occur in the winter on snow-covered asphalt. Walking toward me was a boy named Keith—he’d been a good friend in Moab before moving a couple of years earlier. Until this moment I didn’t know where he’d gone.

  Thank you, I whispered.

  The first day of fifth grade at Spring Creek Elementary began with an assembly. We were the first students in a brand-new school. I wasn’t impressed. Sure, the walls were white with new paint and the desks sparkled, but it was just a building. Then my teacher took our class into the school’s library. New desks were one thing—a room full of new books was something else.

  These books haven’t been read. A virgin landscape of pages and paragraphs and dust jackets that gleamed so brightly under the fluorescent lights that they deserved a choir of singing angels to announce their advent.

  “How many can I check out?” I asked.

  The school librarian laughed. She was the only one.

  My teacher had fifth and sixth graders in the same class. This meant that 1) the class was huge; 2) each grade got half of the teacher’s time and attention; 3) I could read as much as I wanted after I did my work. Our teacher didn’t have time to check on me. I’d never been so excited. Now I’d have daily, uninterrupted hours of reading time.

  One day as I sat reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I realized that someone was calling my name.

  I looked up and noticed that the class was quiet. I looked to the left into Jason Lawson’s eyes. Jason was a cross between a gargoyle and a demon, a blond mixture of torment and confidence. He breathed cruelty and ate nice kids. He held up a book and started blinking his eyes and making noises that signaled to everyone that he was someone stupid.

  He was me.

  Everyone laughed, except me. The teacher wasn’t in the room and I didn’t know how to deflect the attention away from myself.

  I returned to my book, but the page was no longer written in English. The laughter burned my face. It finally stopped when Mr. Maderis returned and class resumed. I blinked, over and over. I couldn’t stop.

  I was no longer anonymous; I’d become That Kid. That Kid who does That Thing. I was already as tall as my teacher so I couldn’t exactly hide.

  Around my parents and siblings, I had tics, but if my siblings noticed, they didn’t mention it. That might have been my mom’s doing, or maybe they’d never known me without tics, so that me not having tics would’ve been what caught their attention. My parents never asked me about it unless I mentioned it. I was safe with my family.

  My other refuge was the bookmobile, a big, fat RV full of books. A library on wheels that came to school once a week. The driver looked at me like I stank when I asked her how I could become a bookmobile driver.

  The first time the bookmobile came I grabbed the biggest book I saw: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. Thus began a beautiful partnership. The deal was that King would write gigantic books and I’d drown in the obscene word counts, lost to the world until the book was closed. The Tommyknockers was full of swearing and I was uneasy during a section in which a woman’s picture of Jesus began talking. People had sex, lost their skin, murdered one another, and wrecked their town. And there were aliens. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  I followed Tommyknockers with Pet Sematary, a book that frightened the bejabbers out of me. Then came Misery. That’s when I learned that my deal with Stephen King included one small contract rider: My mom couldn’t know about it.

  The day after I checked out Misery I came into the living room to find my mom with a serious look on her face. “Honey, sit down.”

  I sat.

  “Can you tell me why you’d want to read this?” she asked, waving the book at me.

  Because it’s a book, I thought. “It’s a good story,” I said.

  “How far have you read?” she asked.

  “About a hundred pages.”

  “And what’s it about?”

  “It’s about a writer who gets in a wreck. He gets saved by a nurse, but it turns out that she’s crazy, but he’s hurt so he can’t get away.”

  She nodded. “I want to tell you a couple of things so you’ll know why I ask. I read the whole book this morning. It made me feel sick. I’m not saying it’s good or it’s bad, I just want you to know how it made me feel. Did you know that she ends up cutting off his foot with an ax?”

  “Really! Why?”

  She shook her head. She hadn’t intended to pique my interest. “Did you read about why she couldn’t be a nurse anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Because she was killing kids in the hospital.”

  “Really? How did they catch her? Did she go to jail?”

  She smiled. “Do you think the author escapes?”

  I nodded. “He has to.”

  “Well, you’re right about that. But first she runs over a police officer with a lawnmower, and she cuts off the writer’s thumb with an electric knife, and at the end he has to kill her to get away, and I—” My eyes were so wide and excited that she stopped. “Honey, do you really think that’s a good story for you to be reading? Oh, no, you don’t!” I was reaching for the book.

  “I’ve got to see how it ends!”

  “I just told you how,” she said. ?
??If you want to read it when you’re older, that’s your choice, but it’s not an appropriate book for a fifth grader. And no more Stephen King in this house for now. Please.”

  When I complained to my dad, he said, “Your mom’s right, don’t read fiction.” But the only way I could’ve quit reading King’s books was to “not be there.” “There” being the bookmobile. But it didn’t stop pulling up to the curb just because my mom didn’t want me reading about crazy nurses chopping people up with axes. So I formed a brilliant plan. I checked out two books whose covers were the same size: It by Stephen King, and The Color of Her Panties by Piers Anthony.

  It was about a monster who murders children. A terrifying book full of blood, scares, and sharp teeth. The Color of Her Panties was a harmless, pun-riddled volume in the Xanth fantasy series. I removed their dust jackets and switched them. I was so cunning that I even taped the dust jackets down so they wouldn’t fall off accidentally. The Great Brain would have approved.

  And yet, to brilliant young Josh, he of the big forehead, bent glasses, and darkening literary appetites, it never occurred that a mother who didn’t like blood and mayhem in her young son’s books might also frown on a book that proudly purports to be about panties.

  When Mom saw the book I was reading—It wrapped in panties—she asked to see it. She removed the dust jacket and saw what I’d done. We looked at each other for a long time without saying anything.

  I’ve read every book King has written since. A contract is a contract. If she saw no issues with binding herself to a God she’d never seen, I didn’t see why I couldn’t bind myself to a guy out in Maine who wrote horror stories.