The Old Funeral Home. Chapter 6. Part One.

 

The Old Funeral Home  Chapter 6 Part One

We have taken a hiatus from the writing of this novel slash memoir. We started in the giddy springtime. (of our first year being remarried) then at the end of a full ripe summer we stopped. (ran out of ideas and triggers) Amy’s ears were getting worse. (it seemed like to him because he was tired of having to enunciate every word) My voice and imagination were growing ragged.

Now it is the new year. The first day of the new year. 2023. And we start again. 

But where do we start? I have to speak much louder and be more articulate for Amy to take my dictation. It wears me out rather quickly. (sorry, my hearing is as it has been since getting back together with Tim, I just make sure I hear and ask questions if I don’t. So to avoid the questions and the tedious conversations about what I thought I heard he tries to speak more clearly and slowly. And so it makes sense that he gets worn out.) I am tempted to just spout a series of haiku, and let the reader tear away the veil of obscurity. But that would be cheating. ( hahaha. Our memories are vague enough that it seems like cheating to write what we do since to rely on memory for what used to be or what happened is a work in obscurity already!!)

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One reason I loved that place is because it was crammed with books. The old funeral home in Tioga, ND, had books in the sewing room, in the back bedroom (library – bedroom) and the basement seemed to be walled with paperbacks (it wasn’t because we had flooding every year in the basement so all the books had been brought upstairs to the library that was the spare bedroom when one was needed. There were five bedrooms in the basement that used to be rooms for prepared bodies to rest while fitting them to their casket. Mom had done a remodel of the basement and put up covered sheetrock to make the rooms more appealing to the kids who slept there. It was pretty creepy to think about the kind of business that had to happen in that place. Especially if you were a teenager with a vivid imagination anyway!)

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I never asked Amy when we were courting why there were so many books around; where they all came from. But I’m asking her now. So “Amy, what’s the deal with all those books?”

“Well, Tim, those books are a representation of my mother’s love of reading. Her passionate unrequited love for learning in a formal institution. Her desire to instill in her children the value of reading and to fulfill her insatiable appetite for reading. She had several collections of great works. Earl Stanley Gardner’s 70 books. Louis L'aMour's 120 books. Zane Grey’s 40 books. National Geographic magazines from 1955 forward, same with Readers Digest magazines and Church magazines from 1966. We kept macaroni boxes, the three pound size, to store the magazines on the shelves. It was effective though not the prettiest look. 

Moving to a new home didn't happen often because we had lots of kids and stuff ( clothes and a few things for each person) but lots of books too. When we moved from Williston to the bar in Ross, ND in 1964, I don’t recall the unpacking of so many books but I remember several bookcases that my dad had made. They got ruined in the basement of the old funeral home because of the flooding. Mom had purchased a metal DIY bookshelf kit to line the walls of the bar first. Then the trailer house of the farm in 1972 because the tiny two bedroom house on the site would not hold our 11 children family. The day we moved into the old funeral home July 31,1977, child number 12 came to reside with us. We began our library in the basement until we discovered the flooding was annual, in the spring. I helped move the library upstairs when I came home from college one summer. When I graduated and came back to Tioga to teach I moved to the “Mother-in-law’s house” out behind the house. It was a three room place with a nook for a bathroom that I don’t count as a room. Moving to that place made sense because the spare bedroom had become a Teenager’s room as the little girls were growing and needing their own space. The metal bookcase was moved upstairs to the library in TOFH until one day it tipped and Dad –  being retired – put up fitted wooden bookshelves to hold the books and photo albums. The sewing room held the video collection of old video cassette tapes. There were some audio cassettes as well. Mom was big on recording everything. She had one of the first home movie cameras on “super 8” film. She graduated to a camera that filmed directly to a cassette tape as soon as that was available. My little sister has transferred much of that to DVD’s and we have a 5 disc set of all the footage.”

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Now I may be wrong. And if I am, Amy will be sure to correct the record. But I remember stealing my first kiss from her against one of the bookcases in the basement in the old funeral home in Tioga.

I have always considered the physical contact of the lips to be the most sensual and exciting moments in a physical relationship. I just tested this out now, by getting out of my recliner, and bending over Amy's in her recliner. And kissing her long and passionately. I feel sorry for those who have no one they can kiss. I know what it is like to kiss, to be kissed, and not to have anyone to kiss. I would prefer to kiss Amy on the lips to an anchovy Pizza or even my name on the New York Times Best Seller List. (now that’s saying something!!!)

I have finished for now. (every sentence but one in the previous paragraph has begun with the word “I”. Knowing that it is a writing red flag for professional writing, I work at varying each initial word. Tim doesn’t really care. That’s ok with me. And I get a sense of comfort knowing that he can decide to be who he is and not care what someone else thinks. Of course, when we work with the AI tools and must meet certain standards, I have the work of changing the things he has written if the beginning of sentences are more than two that start the same.)

 

I forgot to mention how involved my dad was in the collections of books. Mom and Dad used to read to each other before the days of TV. Dad liked to read for a while before he went to sleep, when he was retired. Mom joined a book of the month club early in their marriage. She’d get a deal if she ordered a series. I think she got three books at a time. They liked the Perry Mason mysteries and the jokes in the Reader’s Digest. The westerns of Zane Grey and Louis L’aMour. I forgot to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs. And the three sets of Encyclopedias.I didn’t ever read any of those books until I was in bed for months, pregnant and bleeding. Convalescing at my parent’s home in Tioga. In a room with no TV, with children and nothing to do but watch someone else care for them.)