I was so important that I left an indelible stain on everyone I touched...now, I'm gone for Heaven without warning...sniff, sniff. Don't deny it. Just about everyone thinks their life would be better with a soundtrack; particularly the funeral scene.
Sad to say, not everything that happens in my life is a story worth telling. Think of those awful cocktail party moments when a speaker, who thinks his life is an irony from birth to death, drones on and on about some insignificance or other.
This is not to say that we haven't all got interesting stories to tell, we do, but not everything that happens is a good story. My life isn't linear, and I don't think any else's is either. Stories are linear.
Some Hollywood character said that dialog is what you would have said if you had ten minutes to think of your responses before actually responding. Think how dull life would be if everybody had a snappy rejoinder; what would movies be like? On the flip-side, how dull would life be if we didn't have tiny embarrassments like thinking of the music that we'd like played at our own funeral.
The dull paradigm of ordinary life helps us spot the wacky, non-sequitors that ultimately make life so funny. Did you ever have a laughing fit at a funeral?
Here's a dopey thing that happened to me. I bought a dog, a puppy, for a dollar when I was in HS. My youngest sister, Amy, was a little kid at the time, so sure enough, the dog became her, "little brother".
Years later, she's the one who finds him dead in the living room. She was alone, my parents not yet home from work and the rest of us all grown-up. Naturally, she's hysterical. Her dog is dead! The shock, the sadness, being alone, petting her dead dog's head.
Then two things happen nearly simultaneously: the phone rang, and my mother pulled into the driveway. Amy's friend is on the phone, not yet aware that the dog is dead, and she says to Amy, "When are we going out, tonight?'. Amy replies between sobs, " Ican't...go...outtonightmydogjustdied.", and she immediately hangs up the phone. Amy's friend misunderstands what Amy had sobbed into the phone, and thought she said, "I can't go out, my DAD just died."
Next my mother enters the house, comforts Amy, and calls the cops to find out what to do. As my mother hangs-up the phone, it immediately rings. It's Amy's friend's father who says, "Oh my god, Sandy. I'm coming right over. What can we do?" Mom thinks this is a bit of an overreaction. She says, "No, no. Don't do that. I just called the police. They said to put the body outside with a tarp over it so the animals don't get at him. They'll pick him up in the morning. He should be frozen by then."
The Sullivan's, my blood, always did have a bit of an odd reputation. A little wild, maybe irreverent, but there can't have been any stranger moment for us than our neighbors thinking that we were putting our Dad's dead body outside for the night, under a tarp. The phone rang with condolences for a few days. Rufie, the dog, went out with class.
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