Keeping Tabs on Warren Jeffs While Convalescing

I've beeen resting a great deal lately, partly because that's mostly what I felt like doing. My parents really don't want me to do much more than lie around in bed and watch TV, anyway. My surgeon released me with the assumption that I would spend about twenty-two of every twenty-four hours in bed. There's been so little to do that I've basically complied with all requests.

My mother thinks the reason that I've been so compliant is that I am going to ask for something really big, such as the right to make a large withdrawal from my saving account to buy a car. Right now that's the furthest thing from my mind. Driving where we lived before was a more-or-less routine procedure. Driving where I now live, with two-way-streets that suddenly curve and become one-way streets, constant road construction, very old stoplights that are placed randomly so that one would not notice them unless one already knew they were there, in addition to bona fide crazy people stepping into traffic without looking one way, much less both ways, is nerve-wracking to say the least. While I am licensed to drive, I'm not to eager to demand the right here in my present location.

For once, I'm not being cooperative because I want something. I just don't have anything better to do than to cooperate. It takes less energy just to do what my parents and doctors say than to be oppositional at this point. Someday I may return to my rather contrary personality, but right now I lack the energy. Why even think for myself when I can get someone else to do my thinking for me? (This is temporary. I will want my brain back eventually.)

We've been following some coverage of the Warren Jeffs trial. The polyg lifestyle has fascinated me since I first heard of it when I was a little kid. I couldn't believe I was hearing correctly when I first heard mention of it. "Now?" I remember asking my older cousin. "There are men married to more than one lady at a time right now?"

She told me yes and showed me some pictures of modern polygamists in a magazine. The pictures wouldn't have convinced me, even looking like modern color photographs with people wearing clothes straight out of "Little House on the Prairie" though their hairstyles looked vaguely extraterrestrial, were it not for the modern automobiles in the background.

My mom showed me on a U. S. map where the twin cities of Colorado City, Arozona, and Hilldale, Utah are. She told me that the cities were formerly called "Short Creek." Since that time when I was quite young, Warren Jeffs built a more deluxe settlement near San Angelo, Texas. This settlement featured a temple. Jeffs' temple on his ranch in Texas differed from conventional Mormon temples in that right next to the altar was a bed so that temple marriages could be consummated right then and there in the presence of witnesses. (While I'm often the first to criticize conventional Mormonism, I know many people who have been throughout multiple Mormon temples, including my Dad and my Uncle Steve, who are no longer practicing Mormons, and they all say that there isn't a single bed to be found in any one of the conventional Mormon temples. Jeffs also supposedly built up communities in South Dakota, Montana, and Colorado, though none so elaborately as the community in Texas. My cousin lived with an off-shoot group in Canada for several months recently.

Last summer, my Pseudo-Aunt and Pseudo-Uncle took me on an overnight trip to see the twin cities of Colorado City and Hilldale. There wasn't a lot to see, as most of the pwoplw actually lived in gated areas, but my uncle finagled an invitation to a church service for us. My pseudo-aunt was scared to death that one of the polygs was going to claim her as his fourteenth wife or something like that, but the visitation went without a hitch. We dressed like them. I was still in a really heavy orthopedic device between casts, so they thought I was a little crippled girl and they prayed for me. We pretended to be living The principle, except we told them I was ten and my mama died a few years ago and my new mama, who was sixteen (she was actually 22, but sixteen sounded better) was raising me until my father could find another wife to help her. While we were there, we bought some really good fudge from a shop there that makes and sells it. Warren was no where to be found at the time. I think he was already locked up in a jail somewhere.

I really wish his trial would be televised. it would be straight out of "Big Love." as it is, there will probably be reporters standing outside the courtroom, as in the Scott Peterson case, ready to share anything of interest that happens, and I suspect many things of interest will happen.

Even though her face is blurred out, the picture of the twelve-year-old girl kissing Warren Jeffs after supposedly just marrying him (I've seen the photo in a version where the young bride's face was not blurred) is positively sickening. If that photo is admitted into evidence, it would seem that it alone would be sufficient to convict Warren Jeffs. One never knows what juries will do, though. Still, the trial is being held in Texas. The people of Texas don't necessarily look kindly upon one's freedon to practice a deviant religion. warren Jeffs probably should have foud a more "live and let live" state than Texas for the site of his Yearning for Zion Ranch.

I'm very close to my Pseudo-Uncle, Scott. He's eleven years older than I, which is far closer in age than Warren Jeffs is to the twelve-year-old he allegedly married and was seen kissing in the infamous photo. I'm sixteen-and-a-half, which is considerably older than twelve, although I probably look younger than the girl does. Still, the idea of PseudoUncle Scott, who's not a blood relative (as likely as not, the twelve-year-old is probably at least a second cousin in more ways than one to Warren Jeffs)kissing me anywhere other than on the forehead or cheek would be positively repulsive to me or to him. And he's very good-looking. Warren Jeffs looks like a corpse that was dressed up and made up with mortician's putty and then came back to life.

Many people with Mormon roots have distant relatives in either Jeffs' groups or in one of the spin-off groups. My family didn't become Mormon until long after polygamy was made against official practice in the Mormon church, so, other than the one lunatic relative who hooked up with the Canadian polygamous group, I have no particular familial connection to polygamy. Still I'll be watching the trial somewhat anxiously.