The two missionaries knocked on my door the same afternoon an entire mountain collapsed somewhere in Oregon. “Sinkhole,” the news had reported. It was also a sinkhole that had swallowed half of Mexico City in August, a trailer park in Indiana in July, and the country of Liechtenstein in June. The world’s ever-shortening attention spans, and the fact that re-construction companies propped up the economy allowed these things to wrinkle in and smooth out without much panic; though, those who had once traveled to Liechtenstein continued to mourn the loss of the lovely red and blue crown stamp the country used to put in your passport.
But they came—the missionaries—and it wasn’t the mild tumult of yet another disaster that made me let them in, seat them on our Pottery Barn couch, and offer them cups of faucet water. It was their name tags. White letters engraved on black rectangles: ELDER BENGTZEN and ELDER VANHORN. Granted, I had spent the whole of that day off work playing Skyrim with strangers online, but that word Elder made me feel they had something of wisdom to offer. Like, if I talked to them, they’d give me what I needed to make it to the next level. Seattle, where I lived, seemed a little low on usable wisdom at that point in time...