May 21, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
May 21, 2011

6:00 (Family Radio’s Rapture Event deadline)has come and gone. Even accounting for Daylight Savings Time we are still earthbound. The jokes will continue through tomorrow, I’m sure. “Never thought I’d see you still here on the day after Rapture,” sort of thing. So what’s our lesson about for Monday? The End of the World. Naturally. Fortunately, as Mormons, we understand it to be the end of the wicked, that is: the end of the worldly, so we won’t have to account why we are all still here.
We took an hour or so off during the time we were inspecting missionary apartments for bedbugs and mold yesterday to check out Penns Landing. It’s the Delaware River dock area reminiscent of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. We checked out a clipper ship turned into a restaurant, a submarine (subs are tough to turn into anything more interesting than long black cylinders of death), and a Teddy Roosevelt era Navy Cruiser. Then we watched tugboats bring the USS Kaufman up the Delaware, turn it around in front of the Ben Franklin Bridge, and dock it right next to where we were watching. Then a thunderstorm drenched us so we ran back to the car. Sorry, no photos of Nana next to some handsome sailor in a white uniform.
Nana got to shake hands with Julie B. Beck, the General Relief Society President last night. Sister Beck came to speak at a fireside. She seemed a very kind and unpretentious person. There was no fire and brimstone – little use for that on the day before Rapture- only a kindly question and answer session with about 500 people attending. That woman was brave to let the microphone wander through the audience to let them ask and comment as they pleased.
People of our age always remark about the weather. It is wet. It seems like it is always wet here. Just out of the blue, well out of the grey anyway, the sky seems to suddenly dump buckets of water. Other days when it’s not pouring from the sky it has been foggy and misty, but the rain hasn’t missed a day for weeks. With the rain has come more green that we’ve ever seen in our long senior missionary lives. Even many of the rocks and sidewalks are covered with green moss and or tinged with algae. The lovely flowering dogwood trees gave way to the sweet smelling locusts and also the bright azaleas have now been trumped by the rhododendrons. We walk a mile or two most mornings and again in the evenings through the suburban rainforests of Jenkintown. I’d say it was like walking through the Garden of Eden but the doves are gray and we are far from innocent. Unreasonably, some days we crave the lone and dreary world of home where the rain is infrequent and dirty, our skin is dry, and the wind sometimes blows sand in our eyes.