Mrs. Bunberry

And then someone added one more vote to break the tie. So people it will be. This post is a little different, kind of an experiment if you will. It has almost no pictures, and very little to do with ministry, but it is about the missionaries who I have come to know and, in an odd way, love.  

Mr. and Mrs. Ricer go to the beach

Mr. Ricer loves to cook. He bakes, stirs, and BBQs. Mrs. Ricer loves to cook too. When the short-termers come over to her house on Friday nights she might be found in the kitchen making stovetop popcorn with olive oil. But the first Friday of July couldn't be celebrated indoors. Not by Americans. Not when the sun had decided to shine so brightly and there was a beach within driving distance. So Mr. and Mrs. Ricer picked the three girls up from the Toothy's. "Don't you want to come with us?" They asked Mr. and Mrs. Toothy. But Mr. and Mrs. Toothy just smiled and waved. Friday evenings were their date night.
Miss A, Miss I, and Mrs, B tumbled into the back seat of the Ricer's white car. "Do you know why we brought you with us?" asked Mr. Ricer from the front seat. Mr. Ricer loved to say funny things, and when he did his voice became teasing. His voice was teasing now. "We brought you to be our pack mules. Someone has to carry all the food down to the beach." The girls groaned, but they were smiling too.
"Of course, then we'd have to call you all Jenny." Mrs. Ricer commented.
"Do you know why?" Mr Ricer asked the girls.
Mrs. B hadn't the foggiest clue why they'd have to change names in order to be a pack mule. She thought it must be something like Mr. Toothy's Greece joke. But Miss I, who could talk for hours on how a chicken 'dropped' eggs, responded immediately. "Because most female Mules are called Jenny." She said, adding more information about Mules and Mollys than Mrs. B could ever have guessed. Mr Ricer had to admit she was right. By this time the white car had made it's way to the beach, and the girls found out that Mr. Ricer was only half joking about their being pack mules. Loaded down with everything from beach chairs to bug repellant the girls walked with the Ricers down to the beach and set up "camp."
Mr. Ricer had to start the coals before any cooking could be done. The girls took this as an opportunity to walk along the shore. Peals of laughter floated back up to the Ricers, for Miss I and Miss A were a continual source of amusement to Mrs. B and joined in the laughter with their own unique chimes.


"Cuuuutte" Gushed Miss A, as she bent over a crack in the rock. Mrs. B was too used to Miss A's brand of gushing to come rushing over to take a peek, but she did spare a glance over her shoulder. It was enough, the two girls were bent over one of the funny little creatures that clung firmly to the giant rocks jagged surface. Miss A's finger was hovering over the thing, and Mrs. B surmised that she had just poked it. Turning to a her own nearby creature, she gave it a little poke and watched, amused, as it squished up its "face." Then she had to scramble to catch up to the other girls, who were already wading back to the shore, picking up sand dollars as they went. They would take them home later and dry them out on the balcony.
"I've got a third-world hunger going on here." Miss I groaned, in what Mrs. B could only surmise was an imitation of one of her friend's accents. Miss I and Miss A both seemed to have an inordinate number of friends from other countries, and it was their habit to adopt either a foreign accent or a creative interpretation of grammar while conversing. Mrs. B and Miss A were not going to argue with hunger, it was one topic that all three girls could sympathize with. The walk back up to the grill was immediately started and soon they were close enough for Mr. Ricer to gripe about how much coal he'd burned waiting for them. "We were about to start without you." He chided, but in his teasing voice. "Everybody, grab a bowl and some hashi, and lets get grilling our yakiniku." Mrs. Ricer commanded. The girls obediently picked up a plastic bowl and a pair of chopsticks and gathered around the low rectangular grill. They weren't really sure what yakiniku was, but they were sure to find out if they followed orders fast enough. Yakiniku, it turned out, was a little like a game of hot potato, with some parts of it resembling a food fight, and a few allusions to egg racing thrown in for good measure. The goal was to get perfectly grilled food off the grill, into your sauce bowl, and down your hatch before the rest of the food had shriveled into charred lumps. The real challenge was that Mr. Ricer insisted on putting more stuff on the grill before everyone was ready for it.
"Let us eat what's on it first." Mrs. B grumbled, flustered by the heat of the grill and the insistent popping of burning beef. "You've got to eat faster," Mr. Ricer replied; "Look, thats another burnt carrot."
Mrs. Ricer reached in with her chopsticks and grabbed the vegetable, letting it fall safely on to Miss A's plate. Miss A already had quite a few such 'gifts' from Mrs. Ricer, but she had been given the job of meat girl, and that, with the already heavy responsibility of eating, made her a little inattentive to her plate. Though she did notice when Mrs. Ricer plopped small hot dog on it.
"Eeahyeawv" Miss A moaned, softly. "I don't like hot dogs."
Mr. and Mrs. Ricer both stared at her, and then burst out laughing. It wasn't so much the idea that she didn't like hot dogs that tickled them, it was more her gentle whine and disgusted expression that set them to chuckling. Of course, being yakiniku pros, they were not distracted from their duty for an instant. They were plenty capable of teasing and cooking. Finally the fight with the flames was over and every last piece of food had been eaten, or else thrown into the sand as a solid lump of black. Then it was time to drag out the blanket and start preparing for the fireworks. That meant bug spray and and a few stories. Missionaries love to tell stories. They told stories of wild boar sightings ("And a big inushishi was right there in the middle of the road!"), they told stories of language goofs ("'buchi' is Yamaguchi slang for 'very', 'bochi' means 'grave.' I looked at her and said 'bochi delicious.'"), and they told stories about their life before coming to Japan ("I thought to myself, 'He looks nice, but he's really poorly dressed.' A few years later we were married.'"*). Soon the mountains were hardly visible against the night sky. Mr. Ricer proceeded to get out the fireworks. He let each of the girls take turns lighting them. There was smoke, bright lights, and shrieks of terror. Misses I and A, to the amusement of the unbelieving Ricers, insisted that there was someone out in the darkness spying on them. But then, quite suddenly, a new noise came from behind. Someone was in the tall beach bushes just as Miss I had claimed, and he was shooting fireworks at them! Mr. Ricer, ever practical, continued with his own light display, but Miss I and Miss A screamed with every mysterious bang that erupted from the darkness of the trees. After awhile the screams lessened, even though the intruder's sparks were getting closer and closer. Someone got ahold of the flashlight and shone it into the bushes. Mrs. B could hardly believe her eyes, it was Mr. Toothy! Exposed, he walked unashamedly towards the blanket. Mrs. Toothy showed up seconds later.
"It was his idea. I just watched." She explained, with her inscrutable grin.
"Mr. Toothy," Mrs. B solemnly stated, "You have forever changed my opinion of missionaries."
And with that the whole group gathered together under the starry ocean sky. A team handpicked by God, if only for a short while.



*It's a field requirement for all missionaries to be romantic. Even "retired" missionaries can not find a cure, but are always happy to tell the "how we met and fell in love" story to anyone who asks. Most couples, like the Ricers, have told it so many times that they've managed to get the story straight, right down to who was poorly dressed.