Like What?

Each month each family of the LDS Church is supposed to receive a visit from “home teachers,” a pair lay priesthood holders assigned to look after the welfare of one or more families. Each visit lasts about 30 minutes or so, and includes a lesson and prayer, as well as some chitchat. The chitchat part of home teaching results in some interesting moments. As I grew up in Colorado, we had a home teacher who had a tendency to share the most woeful tales of injury or suffering experienced by others, yet his accounts would be punctuated with laughter. One day, for example, he chortled as he told us of his wife injuring her knee when she fell down some steps in their home. We found this behavior to be fascinating. On one visit my younger brother Doug probed into the psyche of this man by appearing, poker-faced, with a neck brace which Doug had fashioned out of towel - - the “neck brace” Doug wore was perceived as real, and elicited laughter from our home teacher. Today I received a visit from a new pair of home teachers. One is a young man of 21 who just returned from his mission. In telling me about his various social activities, his narrative was sprinkled liberally with the word “like,” as in expressions such as “like that was really cool” or “like, what were we supposed to do?” At one point he said that he and a friend of his are “dating like girls.” Like, I think that “like” should have been placed one word to the left. NOTE: This entry relates to an experience I had on February 26, but was written on March 15.