A funeral home is probably not your first choice
where you’d like to spend a Friday night,
but sometimes you find yourself doing just that.
And I would add, it’s far better
being the guy doing the visiting
than the guy being visited.
We’d all agree with that point.
In any case, we visited a man we scarcely knew,
but needed to pay our respects to on Friday night.

The funeral home was an old Victorian house.
You know the type with a thousand little rooms,
whose only value it was to create a market for doors.
After all, to get from one room to another,
you must go through a door.
Kind of a metaphor for life:
Passing through doors, passing through life,
stuck in small rooms, stuck in a small life.
(Ok to laugh here)

In any case, there we were paying our respects,
getting lost in all these ridiculous tiny rooms,
stuffed with far too many oversized people.
And yes, it is true that people were much smaller
in Victorian times, and so
the small rooms made more sense back then.
That should be some consolation
to those at hand needing to go on a diet.

I spotted an empty overstuffed chair
in the small “goldfinch yellow” room near the front door.
I grabbed it just seconds before some guy with no teeth
started his beeline to the chair.
He gummed some farty sounding words at me,
which I failed to understand, but nodded back at him
as sweetly as only a funeral palor angel can do.
I pretended to read my email on my Blackberry, and eventually
the toothless chap drooled his way out of the room.
I secretly wondered whether the man had lost his teeth
in an earlier brawl over a chair, maybe in his favorite saloon,
where he downed shots and beers.

They say if you sit long enough,
the world will come to YOU.
At least that is what my meditating friends (maybe Dan) tell me.
In this case, it was true on Friday night.
A group of used car salesmen-type people
entered the room (my room at this point).
They were talking loudly, laughing, and
trying to impress a much younger woman
with heavy lipstick and sexy red pumps.

The most rotund of the car salesmen,
a man in his early 60’s,
was the recipient of the little known
Annual Funeral Home Clown of the Year award.
I watched intently as the man leaned toward the woman,
who, at the very same moment, waved her right arm.
It happened so suddenly, everybody nearly missed it:
the woman’s hand whacked the rotund car salesman’s head,
knocking lose what nobody imagined, but his jet black toupee.
The hair piece sprouted wings, and flew
till it came to rest in the middle of a crowd
huddled in the next small room over.

Dead silence fell upon the room.
Just the sort of thing that
one should experience at a funeral home.

Because of his sense of humor, dedicated to Floots.