Tuesday

Today I attended the English-speaking Mormon branch in Taichung for a second time, the first time having been back in December. No one had spoken to me the first time, but this time people were in a friendlier mood, or perhaps I was, and I made the acquaintance of a few of the members.

The testimony meeting was conducted by a man with a very long beard, and after the meeting he came up to me and said, "We've met before."

"Well, I've attended here once before," I said.

I hadn't spoken to a soul that first time, though, so I quite taken aback by what he said next: "Your name is William, right? And your middle name is James, and your last name begins with a T?"

It turns out we had met briefly six years earlier, when he was clean-shaven and looked very different, in a restaurant. He had added me on Facebook, which I was still using occasionally back then, and when he posted an obscure coded message on his Facebook page, involving the Deseret alphabet and drawings of Egyptian gods, I had been the only one to crack the code. He had remembered all that when he saw me in church, looked up that old Facebook post, and found my full name -- though of course he didn't know how to pronounce the surname. Pretty impressive! We ended up sitting together in Sunday school and chatted a bit afterwards. He mentioned that he raises turtles -- over 200 of them -- and later I looked him up on YouTube and watched this video of 60 tiny turtles devouring a large leaf:

In Sunday school, one of the members told a story about some chickens who took flying lessons from some geese. When the chickens finally succeeded in learning to fly, they were very happy, thanked their teachers, and walked home.

I guess I have a certain amount in common with those chickens, since immediately after church I proceeded to "break the Sabbath" by Mormon standards and visit a used bookstore. The only book to catch my eye there was a picture book called Tuesday by David Wiesner.

It begins with some pictures of turtles in a swamp, quite similar to the ones in the video above. Then lots of frogs sitting on lily pads start to fly.

Most of the book consists of pictures of these frogs flying around. They fly into a town, enter people's houses through windows and chimneys, and so on. At one point they are flying along with, or perhaps chasing, a running dog:

When the sun comes up, the frogs come back to earth and hop back to their pond.

The turtles and the large leaves sync with the YouTube video. The frogs learning to fly and then "walking" home syncs with the chicken story. The flying frogs chasing a dog syncs with the frog-like alien who tried to steal a dog in "Hometo Omleto."