I haven't done this in forever. It's midnight and I've just finished the pages I made myself write for WotF this quarter. Yay for sleep deprivation in the name of art.

Thanks to the people who gave me nice compliments about the creative nonfiction. Here's another one. I read this one at the grad student reading a few weekends ago.

How to Tell It

The first thing to know about Elder Wayne was that he wrestled a bear. He'd slip it in, mention it in passing. He liked people to tease it out of him. "You did what now?" Sometimes he used the story to break up inane conversations. "Hollywood is just being taken over by homosexuals," one older member would say, and Elder Wayne would come right back with, "Did I ever tell you about the time I wrestled a bear?"

On missions, with little in the way of visual, auditory or read entertainment, we all had to gain some skill in oral tradition to relate our adventures. It was a learned skill, honed and practiced as we lay on our beds, unwinding from a day full of heated conversations about theology. Some missionaries were more skilled than others. Wayne was Pavarotti.

When he told it in full, the bear and the bear's siblings were being relocated to a den after they had been tranquilized. Elder Wayne was standing over this particular bear, who, it turns out, was not tranquilized all the way. Groggy but angry, the bear reared up and Elder Wayne tried to push it back down. It didn't go. It tried to claw him with its front paws, but Wayne stayed behind it. As a matter of fact, he got the bear in a full nelson. The bear tore chunks out of his legs as it came more and more awake. Elder Wayne's father, from the front of the den, called out, "Get out in one… two… three… now!" Elder Wayne dove for the door of the den just as his father jabbed the bear with a dose of tranquilizer on the end of a pole.

If he had his way, Wayne would leave the fact that the bear was adolescent and drugged out of it. "We were putting it in a den and it woke up," he would say.

"So it was a teenage bear?" I asked him one night after he had let that information slip.

"Well, yeah," he said.

"How much did it weigh?"

"One hundred-thirty pounds. So yeah, I outweighed it. But a Doberman's like, what, sixty pounds?"

I couldn't begrudge him a few embellishments. He played his part and was eccentrically obsessed with animals. He kept a snapping turtle in the apartment and fed it nightcrawlers, and at one point let a squirrel loose to run around our place. He stared down a big black dog that a woman turned out of her house on us, and brushing past the beast, knocked on her door. "Dogs don't scare me. I wrestled a bear."

Every time Wayne told the bear story, he imbued it with a sense of wonder. The fact that he believed it eventually made me want to believe it. I stopped questioning. Some stories are meant to be told, and heard, and accepted.