Here are some things we thought were true about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, which of course we knew not one such person, growing up in a Catholic enclave in New York City where spotting the occasional Lutheran was a weekend sport, and there was rumour of a Jewish temple somewhere in Brooklyn, and one time the brother of a friend had seen a Hindu man on the street, or so he said, but he was not the kind of guy you could totally trust when he said that, and he may well have seen a rodeo rider, or a Mohammedan, as my grandfather used to say.
We thought, first of all, that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints were called Mermens, as my grandfather said, so we thought that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints were an aquatic people, for reasons that were murky, considering their long affiliation with Utah, which we didn't think had an ocean, although perhaps it used to when my grandfather was young, which is when your man Abraham Lincoln was president, as he said.
Also we heard the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints as Ladder-Day Saints, which was puzzling, but not even my grandfather knew what that was all about; it had something to do with Jacob's Ladder, he said, which we assumed was a town in Utah. Also we thought members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Ladder-Day Saints married someone new every third or fourth day, which would lead to a lot of wet towels left on the bathroom floor, wouldn't it, boy? as my grandfather said.
But marrying more than once was not wholly unknown in our Catholic world; Mrs Cooney, over at Saint Rita's Parish, had married Mr Cooney after the death of her first husband in the war, so she was both a widow and an adult, said my grandfather, who told me that as a female adult she was what you would call an adultress. My grandfather was a font of such wisdom.
Also he said that the Mermens had learned about football from the Catholics, who invented it at