Slovene Sunday - Giving Thanks

In November of 1999 I was living Ljubljana Slovenija. I'd been there since the previous June and by this time was feeling really really comfortable in the city. There were lots of people whose paths I crossed all the time, and who I had begun to recognize, and/or feel like I knew a bit. One of these was the woman who lived in the red porno booth just outside Tivoli Park on Celovska Cesta. And by 'lived' I mean worked, and by 'porno booth' I mean the red booth where you buy bus zetoni (tokens), and magazines - some of which were porn, and prominently displayed.

When we bought bus tokens we would have to look at her and only her - kind of a game to not let our eyes stray. (Tangent: it was never as big a deal for me to not look at the naked lady magazines as it was for the other missionaries - huh, wonder why...) I went so far as to hold longer-than-neccesary conversations with her. I got to really like her - she spent so much time in that small booth every day, and yet she was never mean or cranky to me. I wondered about her from time to time, and her life.

This November, for English class we were going to have An American Thanksgiving Dinner. Thanksgiving isn't observed in Slovenija and we missionaries thought it would be fun to show our students some of the cultural quirks of the holiday. We missionaries spent a great deal of the day preparing the dinner for the 30 or so Slovenes, and when they started arriving for class we arranged them into 'families'. I thought I was funny, and tried to teach some of the people in my 'family' to use passive-aggressive English. The dinner got underway and we missionaries were serving, back and forth from the kitchen. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food, though most everyone was eating small small portions, as per usual for Slovenes.

I don't know what made me think of her, but The Red-Booth Lady crossed my mind. There we were all in the church eating dinner together, and there she was out in her porno booth all alone. I don't know if she felt alone right then, or if she even cared, but I felt for her. I went into the kitchen and made up a plate of Thanksgiving dinner for her. Missionaries weren't supposed to go anywhere alone, but I couldn't get any of the elders to come out with me, so I asked one of the guys in the English class to come out with me on an errand. We walked out of the church with the warm plate of food, down the stairs and across the courtyard. We walked out onto the street and down a couple yards to the red-booth.

She looked up when I stopped in front of her window, and I held out the plate and a fork. I explained in Slovene that upstairs were were celebrating the American holiday of food, and I thought of her and that she might like a plate. She smiled. She really smiled for the first time since I'd known her. She put her hand on her heart and tipped her head, and said Thanks! Najlepsa Hvala! I smiled back at her and went back inside and continued the English class. Later I went back to get the plate and fork, and she said thank you again, and said it was a delicious dinner.

It would make a more missionaryish story if she had brought the plate back to the church of her own volition, and saw what nice people there were while she was there, and stayed, and came back on Sundays and took the missionary discussions and gotten baptized and was now the Relief Society President. But none of that happened. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to her again, and was transferred across the country to Maribor the next month. When I did come back to Ljubljana she wasn't working in the red booth anymore - I never ran across her again. Not a super-missionary ending to the story. However I don't care - her smile when I gave her the plate is enough. For a moment she was more than the lady in the porno booth to me, she was someone I cared about.