It's My Funeral and You're Invited

Please Note:  As far as I know, I am in perfect health and any rumors of my impending death are pure gossip and heartless taunting.

My kitchen cabinet knobs do not match, and I love that they do not match, even though it drives Phillip, my son-in-law, batty. 

He has informed me, “As soon as you’re dead, I’m changing out these goofy, eclectic, bohemian knobs.” (That is the official title for my decorating style—eclectic bohemian, which means I’m just this side of a gypsy queen and not adverse to bleached animal skulls as chotchkies.) 

Phillip always looks itchy when he tells me about his de-knobbing of my kitchen on the event of my death. He mumbles about burning my giant gourd that flips open on a hinge, but I think it’s just idle gourd burning talk. It’s those knobs that really bug him.

I love those knobs for giving me a reason to live.

“Hey, Mom, come here and listen to the music we’re going to play at your funeral.” Adam, my teenage son, looked pleased and proud as he played the tune he had picked out for my funeral service.  It was a wonderful, sentimental, joyful choice. I wept. It made me sorry I wouldn’t be there what with the excellent choice in music and my son-in-law in attendance, counting down the minutes until he’ll be free to take the knobs off my kitchen cabinets.

The subject of my death and funeral seems to prove an endless source of amusement for my family; they’ve already decided that in place of a eulogy, they’ll be holding a “Mock-ogy,” which, apparently, is not dissimilar to a “Roast.” First, they’ll play that really cool music and then someone will stand up and announce, “Let the mocking begin.”

Since it’s my funeral, I have a few suggestions for my enthusiastic, smart aleck family. And since I have an irrational fear of being IN something, UNDER something (for example I have an irrational fear of being in a car under the water, or in a New York City subway under New York City, or in a box under the ground) I would like to be buried above the ground. Perhaps I might be buried in a pyramid, assorted safety deposit boxes, catacomb, or eagle’s nest in the back pasture.

My preference is the eagle’s nest, and I would like to be rolled to the nest using the little red wagon with the jittery wheels. An America flag should be flying at half-mast from the back of the wagon.

Crying is right out! Very few people look attractive crying, and I won’t have it. There should be folk dancing, but I’m not sure when to fit it into the schedule, and since Phillip is going to remove them anyway, I’d like to be buried with my knobs and my thesaurus.

Please consider this posting a legal expression of my final wishes.

The advantage of having garnered the reputation for being a little eclectic and a lot bohemian during one’s lifetime is that people expect to see graffiti on the walls inside your house and bowling balls in your garden, and if they show up to your funeral they won’t be surprised by the free coupons to Golden Corral that will be handed out at the door.

 Linda (Gypsy Queen of the Buffet Line) Zern   

IN MEMORY

No one builds memorials like the military. No one. Their monuments to memory are built on the blood and bones of friends and brothers.

When our son returned to Fort Hood, Texas from his first deployment to Iraq, we visited him. He was anxious to show us the place where he lived, relaxed, and worked. More than that he was anxious to show us the 4^th Infantry memorial from their victory in that bloody and broken part of the world.

In gratitude to the fallen soldiers of the 4^th Infantry, the original artist took his bronze bust of Saddam Hussein and recast it. He turned a tyrant’s face into the figure of a grieving soldier as he knelt in the sand before the empty boots, rifle, and helmet of a dead friend.

Behind the soldier a tiny Iraqi girl reaches out to touch his shoulder—in comfort, in gratitude. It is a heart stopping moment of remembrance.

The names of the lost and dead circle the artist’s statue in a curve of glittering stone. Everything about that memorial whispers, “Hush. Hush. Be still. Be quiet. And know that someone died for you.”

We watched a group of teenagers laugh and joke their way across the open field as they came our way. Throwing a Frisbee, they looked what they were—young and happy and alive. Their Frisbee game continued right up to the moment they stepped into the circle of the dead. And then silence—even reverence. One of the girls knelt and lit a candle in front of one of the names on the wall. Her friends stood quietly as she prayed.

When my husband and I got home from Fort Hood we sat in our church’s Sunday meeting. Young men prepared the bread and water for the sacrament, covering it with a clean white cloth. The room around us was filled with chatter and noise. People talked and visited. Church business was done.

I looked again at the sacrament table seeing it for the memorial that it was supposed to represent. I thought of the sacrifice it symbolized, of the blood and bone given for me, of the eternal truth that the price of freedom is blood and always has been.

And I heard a still small voice whisper, “Hush. Hush. Be still. Be quiet. And know that someone died for you.”           

ZOMBIE SQUIRREL APOCALYPSE

It started with a loud transformer pop on Wednesday. The lights flickered, dimmed—went dark. I held my breath. I had emails to check, cable news to yell about.  Then the lights bounced back on. I exhaled and thought about and then rejected the idea of doing laundry in one of my energy sucking major appliances.

Later that same day, granddaughter (age 9) reported her discovery of a dead carcass at the base of the power pole—type and style, squirrel.

No correlation between the first popping incident and the corpse discovery occurred to anyone on our emergency response team. Okay, I am the emergency response team. I didn’t get it. Transformer. Squirrel. Big Boom. Light should have gone on, in a manner of speaking, but no.

At four, in the very dark morning of Thursday, the Zern family power grid was brought down, and I mean all the way down . . . by a single assassin squirrel.

The machine that conditioned our air ground to a halt. The fans that stirred our conditioned air around spun ever more slowly. The lights that blink and wink and twink in the night were gone. Darkness swallowed more of the blackness. I thought I heard a squirrel howl.

I fumbled for a candle, a torch, a hurricane lantern. My son-in-law threw himself behind the wheel of their crappy Jeep, searching the neighborhood for signs of electric. The babies grumbled for fresh water, cool air, clean diapers, warm milk, and sweet nightlights.

Darkness, like smog, settled over our lives. We waited for the morning’s light.

As we waited for the power company to fix us, we looked at the French fried body of the terror squirrel.

Someone observed, “Geez, who needs an EMP attack, a couple million well trained suicide squirrels and America’s back in the stone-age.

I repeated this bit of clever repartee to the power pole guy. He neither laughed nor smiled. He calmly stepped over the body of dead squirrel and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

And he did.

The moral of the story is that although I store water in plastic milk jugs for just such emergencies, the thought of pouring that water into a clean baby bottle and feeding it to an actual baby made me itch. On Friday, I ordered a month’s worth of sterile canned water, good for fifty years or the zombie squirrel apocalypse, whichever comes first.

Linda (Testing, Testing) Zern