(Or how I ended up sleeping in Barbara Smith's bed)
I was pretty sad the day the Mormons left town. Roddy Zurenborg was my best friend, big brother and protector. When his family moved away I lost my body guard, and the neighborhood became a dangerous place for 10-year-olds.
That was it for the Mormons until many years later when I moved to a western Missouri town just outside Kansas City. Who'd have thought that the town of Independence was the spot where the Mormons believed Jesus Christ would land when he returned to Earth. Who knew that there was more than one flavor of the Mormons -- The Reorganized LDS, Temple Lot, Cutlerites and Restoration Branches headquartered at Independence. The Utah Mormons even had a visitors center there to be close to the action when Christ returned, and were apparently very bent out of shape that the RLDS (now known as the Church of Christ) owned the deed to Christ's landing pad.
In addition to Jesus Christ, Harry Truman was Independence's other famous returnee. He retired there after being president. I wish I could have asked Harry Truman what he though of the religious politics of his old hometown, but he died a few years before I arrived. There was a very nice larger- than-life bronze statue of Harry on the town square.
I got myself a small apartment on the outskirts of town near a new middle school and a cornfield. The apartments were new. too. A year before they and the school had been part of the cornfield. A few years later the city acquired what was left of the cornfield, dug a hole for a pond and turned the land into a nature preserve. You'd be surprised how fast the trees grow back.
The apartments were like a college dormitory, young and very social. That's how I met Big Bob, Barbara and her husband one day after work. Bob was out from New Jersey, doing some specialized construction work on a hospital in Kansas City. I never caught what Barbara's husband did. Barbara was a gorgeous, vivacious redhead with short hair and freckles. One part of an obviously loving couple. Barbara we learned was the great-great-great-great granddaughter of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.
Big Bob provided most of the entertainment: good drinking buddy, nonstop talk. If someone was giving you the evil eye in a bar, Bob would tap them on the should and they'd think better of it and walk away. Bob was really big. Bob was also a babe magnet. This I never understood. Maybe it had something to do with animal magnetism and smooth talk.
Paradise lasted awhile until one night over a beer Bob announced that Barbara had run off never to return. Her husband moved out of their apartment and was soon gone too. Someone told Bob he could have their furniture and since Bob didn't need it he gave it to me. I returned all my rented stuff and took over Barbara's. That's how I ended up sleeping in Barbara's bed... sans Barbara.
