One more step and I will be the next person through the mortuary door. In all my fifty-two years, I have never seen a line this long to enter a funeral home for a viewing. What a tremendous testimony to the life of a good man. To have this many people come to his viewing spoke volumes about the man, himself.
It was a sultry, October evening, and I prayed it would be cooler inside. I stepped through the doors and was reminded of a line at an amusement park. I looked at it winding this way and that, and I couldn't even see the casket, or the widow. The heat inside was worse than that on the porch, and the air stood completely still.
I didn't know the man and woman in front of me or behind me, so I just stared straight ahead. I felt that it was disrespectful to gab and laugh at this time, but a couple across the way were doing just that. She was showing pictures to the man in front of her and they were guffawing. I mean it. Guffawing!
The aroma of chrysanthemums and gladiolas began to overwhelm me. All of a sudden everything seemed unreal, as if in a dream. The lighting appeared to change to an amber hue. The chattering voices grew dim and started floating away. And that smell. I started to suffocate.
The people behind me started jostling me, just as they do in the line to get into a movie. Then I saw it. A woman came from behind me and walked up to a friend, I guess, eight or ten people ahead of me.
"Mary Alice," she called, hand raised in greeting. She was an example of extremes. Her body was too large; her voice was too loud; her hair was too red; her ring was too big. She pushed right ahead into line so she wouldn’t have to wait an hour like we did.
The hair on the back of my neck rose up and tingled. If that isn’t the ultimate rudeness, I don’t know what is. Here I am sick from the heat, and the strong odor, and fatigue, and she waltzes in as if she owns the place and forces her way to the front.
Anna Marie didn’t like this place. She wished her mommy hadn’t brought her. She wished she had let her stay home and play with Mary Ida, her best friend from school.
They had to stand in line, and it was so hot, she almost got sick. She was so much littler than everybody else, that she couldn’t see anything but legs and people’s bottoms. Her mother held fast to her hand, and kept wiping her eyes with a tissue.
Anna Marie thought her mother was crying. She knew the woman over there in the bright red dress was crying. Everybody crying and hugging made Anna Marie feel like crying.
Everybody was talking real quiet-like. It was creepy! She heard someone say there was a dead person up ahead. She’d never seen a dead person, and she didn’t want to now!
Wait till I tell everybody in Mrs. Gate’s second grade class. They’ll think it’s gross.
Suddenly, she saw her grandmomma coming. She heard her call out to her mommy. “Mary Alice!” she called, and raised her hand.
Oh boy, she thought. She’ll take me home, now, I bet.
The rude woman walked over to a lady wearing a blue dress, who was holding the hand of a little girl. The little girl’s eyes were staring at everything around her and her lip was quivering. At the sound of the woman’s call, the child’s head snapped around and her face brightened.
“Let me take Karen home,” the rude woman said. “She doesn’t belong here.”
“Oh, Mom, that would be great.”
The large woman squatted down to the little girl’s level. “You wanna go home, with Grandmmoma, Sweetie?”
The little girl nodded, took her grandmomma’s hand and walked quickly out of the crowded room.
I dropped my head.
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Reviewed by Luc Huynh
3/19/2007
you may see 2 sides everywhere, but to choose one and stand firm on it is far from easy,
so goes the story...
A wicked Cajun Fairy named Robes Pierre entered the impenetrable Magical doll land of Sha Bebe. Queen Faustina, the ruler of the doll land, thought she had destroyed him, but he's back! Will the doll land survive his evil ways?
