Pioneer Day

Also down the street lived a girl from Utah.  Her mother was a Catholic, but her father was a Mormon, and it was decided somehow that her sister would be a Catholic but she would be a Mormon.  I guess the parents just went fifty-fifty on their children's religion.  The older sister looked like her mother, and the young one looked like the father.  It made sense that each child should take the religion of the parent they resembled.

She was a nice girl, a youngest child of older parents who spoiled her rotten while still instilling social graces.  Like me, she knew how to work her devoted father to get what she wanted.  At the age of fourteen, she had a car.

We were friends, so she invited me to go to church with her.  The rest of us in the neighborhood considered the Mormon church an essentially Utah experience, and at that point, it mostly was.  Most of the people at the church were from Utah, and those that weren't looked to Utah as some sort of mecca toward which the faithful faced when they pray.  We often heard the words, "In Utah . . . . "  People from Utah or those who had lived in Utah for a long period of time were seen as authorities on how to live.  The special Utah holiday Pioneer Day was celebrated in East Texas, even though none of our ancestors had crossed the planes in handcarts or starved in the snow.  My ancestors were Mexican cowboys who probably never saw snow, and if they had, would have had the sense not to walk through it more than absolutely necessary, risking their lives for the sake of a charismatic religion.  For this reason, they were not Pioneers, and not celebrated on July 24, not celebrated at all in the Mormon faith because they weren't Mormon ancestors, at least not yet.