The Undertaker……

(I wrote this early yesterday morning. I thought it was deleted but I found it in My Documents in a MS Word file. Blogger was having very large teething problems yesterday and I thought it had gotten deleted. I won’t send any nasty emails to blogger support like some other person I know. 8^) I am posting it now.)

I have a visitor staying with me. I came home from my meeting last night to all the lights on in the house. It was almost dark outside. My great aunt decided she needed to go to the ophthalmologist this morning to see about a cataract. She caught a ride with Charlie who commutes to and from work and goes nearby her house everyday.

I knew to set the alarm clock for 6:30 AM. That is 5:30 AM her time. She gets up at the crack of dawn. I walked outside in the pre-dawn dark to see if the lights were on upstairs and they were. I gathered a frying pan, some bacon, eggs, butter, wheat bread, milk, and apple juice and carried them upstairs to cook some breakfast. Breakfast is her biggest meal of the day.

After cooking breakfast, we both sat at the kitchen table sipping on hot cups of coffee. She was telling me all who had died recently and what has been happening in Waverly. My father calls her the walking obituaries.

“Ole Robert Lacy of Camphill passed away yesterday.” She said.

“Who is Robert Lacy?” I asked.

“He used to run the five points grocery store in Waverly across from the house. During the war in Europe he and his wife had the prices so high that people couldn’t afford to eat. They took advantage of the rationing and price gouged. That’s how he got rich.” She said.

I just chuckled and thought to myself that my great aunt loves to embellish. She can also hold a grudge over something that happened 50 years ago.

“Well, he didn’t get to take it with him.” I said.

She just nodded her head and took another sip of coffee.

“So, has there been anything interesting going on in Waverly this week?” I asked.

“The undertaker is back on the job. He took a vacation and is back at work.” She said.

I got a hearty laugh out of this. The person who my great aunt calls the undertaker is a mid-sixties man named Ken Mangram. He reminds me of Carl from the movie Sling Blade. There is something not quite right about Ken and he has, for years, stood in the old Waverly cemetery and watched the cars go by all day. He has been a fixture in the cemetery since my youth. When I was a child, we would pass the cemetery on the way to my grandmother’s house. Good old Ken was always standing out there. My father used to tease us that the undertaker would catch us and bury us if we weren’t careful or acted bad. We would squeal with protest and it would make us shiver.

“Well, there was something never quite right with Ken.” I said.

“Willie Mae said he got hit on the head when he was a baby. He was never the same since.” She replied.

Willie Mae is my great aunt’s 83 year old cousin. She is the proverbial dirty old lady. She will slap me on my ass and tell me how cute I look. One time, Willie Mae told me, “You know, if I was fifty years younger, I would jump your bones.” I almost threw up when she said it. I take everything Willie Mae says with a very large grain of salt.

I finally got up and washed the dishes. I was still very tired. I got up way before my normal time. I am going to go crawl back into the bed and get another hour of sleep. Good morning and be well.