Revised mortician vignette

"Where's your aria this morning?" I asked the singing mortician as he leaned out of his red car in his dull scrubs to put on his new and very white tennis shoes. To be fair, he only sang once that I heard, and that was to test the valley's acoustics. Tariffs came up. Then "it's in the prophecy; man's rule is going to end. It's larger than people," he said. Didn't answer my question about what comes next, though I agreed with him that civilization might be ending. (See _Life After Doom_.) In general chemistry, he'd wondered why they were learning about other people's theorems; why was he paying for that? He's just paid $800 for new tires, but they came with "free" road service and tire rotation.

 

"EMTs used to be able to tell a person's condition by look and by feel; now they need their cell phones for everything." He wandered into a story about a young man in the back of a limousine during a wedding who offered to share the music from his phone. No one heard it. Turns out he had his headphones on. When he was an EMT, the mortician said, they were sent to Florida to learn reflexology; you can tell so much by examining someone's feet. As he pointed to his red Mercedes, he noted how much people get caught up in their things. Nothing matters during an emergency. Doesn't matter who you are.

 

One evening in NYC they picked up a homeless guy and then a judge, who was in cardiac arrest. There they were, next to each other in the ER, and the homeless guy had been there so much he knew exactly what treatment he needed. The judge died. All that training, the mortician exclaimed, and he died next to a homeless man. 

 

A woman called to say her baby was in distress. His team and lots of police descended on the building where the elevator wasn't working. So they climbed lots of steps, got past the mother, looked in all the rooms. "Where's the baby?" It was her son, as big as the mortician, he said, seated on the couch with a tummy ache.

 

I noted that Lilith was utterly fascinated by the smells there at the top of the hill, where the chapel and the morgue are. "Lots to smell up here," he said. "Chemicals, bodies." He had his shoes on and stood up. Leaned on the roof of his car, said that he was tired. Lilith and I headed down the hill. A man was trimming the royal palms from his perch over his large equipment. Another man in a cart kept his eyes on him. A spotter, I thought.

The singing mortician talks life and death

"Where's your aria this morning?" I asked the singing mortician as he leaned out of his red car in his dull scrubs to put on his new and very white tennis shoes. To be fair, he only sang once that I heard, and that was to test the valley's acoustics. Tariffs came up. Then "it's in the prophecy; man's rule is going to end. It's larger than people," he said. Didn't answer my question about what comes next, though I agreed with him that civilization might be ending. (See _Life After Doom_.) In general chemistry, he'd wondered why they were learning about other people's theorems; why was he paying for that? He's just paid $800 for new tires, but they came with "free" road service and tire rotation.

 

Before he became a mortician in Hawai`i, he was an EMT in New York. On one call, they picked up a homeless guy and then a judge, who was in cardiac arrest. There they were, next to each other in the ER, and the homeless guy had been there so much he knew exactly what treatment he needed. The judge died. All that training, the mortician exclaimed, and he died next to a homeless man. 

 

A woman called to say her baby was in distress. His team and lots of police descended on the building where the elevator wasn't working. So they climbed lots of steps, got past the mother, looked in all the rooms. "Where's the baby?" It was her son, as big as the mortician, he said, seated on the couch with a tummy ache.

 

He had his shoes on and stood up. Leaned on the roof of his car, said that he was tired. Lilith and I headed down the hill. A man was trimming the royals palms from his perch over his large equipment. Another man in a cart kept his eyes on him. A spotter, I thought.

 

Lilith and the little boy

"Puppy!" A little boy, dressed in a funeral suit of black and white, saw Lilith as we approached the chapel in Valley of the Temples. He was with his parents, who spoke Filipino, and an older sister. They were clearly early for the ceremony, as no one else was around. "Do you like puppies?" I asked, and approached the boy. His mother showed him how to greet a stranger dog, hand held out, still. I had to lean down over to hear him answer my question. He has a dog named Bowser. I punned, "Bowser, Wowser," and he responded, "No! Bowser!" Lilith was distracted by other smells, but I turned her around, like a small container ship, and started to pet her. The little boy joined in. "Black!" he said, noting the stripe of black fur she has on her otherwise gray back. He leaned over, hugged Lilith around the neck, and put his face down on her.

 

As Lilith and I descended the next hill--from the area where Marcos was once buried--I saw that the small family had come part way down the first hill. And then I heard the voices of friendly children hailing us.

Lilith encounters Christian nationalism

At the back of Valley of the Temples cemetery, up against the Ko`olau, the Wang monument features images of Lincoln and Washington tucked beneath a cross. On the other side of a nearly closed stone rectangle are large reliefs of the American capitol building and the white house. Inside the rectangle there are many niches behind black stone. No one seems to be buried there. Lilith and I found one of our worker friends there out front with a hose, watering grass (the pigs keep turning it up, he explained). The guy who bought the monument is 20 years old, he told me. He's married to one of the bosses, so he should know. He wanted it to be bigger than the monument for the Chinese general down the hill. The general, our friend explained, was a freedom fighter in China, anti-communist; he is beloved in his community here. Ah, see, he actually did something, I said. And he's even dead. Christian nationalism has its own rules.