Eric the solid meat butcher.  Show him your digits.

Ogthoro, a candid man with a devious plan, one hand, and a used juicer for sale at half price.

Elrondo and his boot with the secret spur.  He’s the plaster of Paris, two-ton tomatillo bandit.

Dennis the ex-jeweler.  Got out before he ever got in.

Perry Combover, he’s travel broke and hungry.  Needs guitar strings.

Landerhand, Oursler, Eckman, Frankie Fisch, Jackie Sides, Erath Minichew, Basarion the Bean Roaster, Vern Bickford, Sally Hoyt, Bearman, Ritter, Troncoso, Anselmo, Brummel, Dick Sisler, Hooper and Struth.  They’re built to know your needs.  The power of mediocrity compels them.

“Pass me the cider, Grandma.  No, the cider, not the cyanide gravy.”  To his friend, under his breath, “She’s almost 90.  Fumes for brain cells.  But she can still wrestle.”

“That was good.  But don’t waste it.  Don’t waste it on people who won’t understand.”  AWL, Little Man Exports.

But first, one bit of advice regarding the task, advice that I believe you would have written to me, if given the chance.

You must suspend your emotions while carrying the casket.  Otherwise you could fail in your duty.  A weak link spills the cadaver on the cold chapel floor.  How embarrassing.  But for whom?  Those alive I guess, for the dead, but the dead couldn’t care less.  Might even think it humorous.  Don’t cry over spilled milk.  Don’t fret over a jettisoned body.  But that doesn’t happen.  Or maybe it does more often than we think.  In the midst of those thoughts you suspend your grief and summon some portion of Viking or knightly strength.  And you bear your fallen comrade like a man.  Or you stay home and tend to the weeping and the wake table.

Now then, I went to see your body early, privacy for the mourning, you know.  Didn’t want the pressure of the visitation line, though I did that too, later, with the full roster of progeny.  “Why’s he sleeping?” Ellaiden asked that evening as we walked by your open casket.  She was in my arms and was squirming for freedom after having already caught a glimpse of the food table.  I was wearing bright white running shoes with grey jeans and felt like Seinfield.  Is it discourteous to wear spanking fresh kicks to your best friend’s viewing?  And when’s it appropriate to let your three-year-old daughter see someone she knew in a coffin?

But earlier I went for the one on one.  Arm in arm with my sister, I let fall some tears, loosed then suppressed a couple shoulder shakes, and then approached solo.  Your hands, cold and white like a refrigerated mannequin’s, were crossed about your waist as if you were in mid-dance move.   Your chest felt thin and hollow.  I wondered if they didn’t empty you out for science, but who would I ask such a thing?  No harm there, you know, shuffling off your organs for the cause.  Might as well.  Your stomach was hard and tight, like when you pat a stuffed bear at a natural history museum.  A knock and no give.  Death’s hard like that.  Taxidermists, morticians, cold paths to trod.

Your lips were pursed.  Is that the right word?  “Pursed”?  Is that word a connoted cousin with its homonym, a closed purse holding make-up and money and what all else, a pursed pair of lips keeping in words, keeping out whatever’s floating in the world?  So let’s just say your lips were closed in a pursed smirk, as if you were holding a dollar twenty-five in quarters right there in the front of your teeth.  Would that be too much money though to hold in one’s mouth and still carry the casual pursed look?  It’s enough to find a mirror and try it out myself.

At some point, I kissed your buzzed head.  I figured this would be the real zone.  And it was, the top of your scalp the realest looking and realist feeling texture on your lifeless body.  Because hair always feels like…hair.  Which is to say, lifeless.  My pursed lips kissing your head, well, they made that smack, that stereotypical smack.  If there was clip art for sounds my offering would be an option for a “quick kiss.”  It was louder than I had planned, this smack of a peck.  And I felt all alone there in the world, just me and your body and the echo of my clip art kiss.

“You did it,” I said patting your plank hard museum bear chest.  And then I thought, You got out first.  And in.  Into the long eternal.  The first of my friends.  Just like you to trend set.  I stifled a sob because why should I want you back in the condition you were in? Who would want to be sucked back into a world where everything, you more than most, was broken?  So I stood and waited.

And then I heard you.  Heard you speak in my brain.  Or in my heart, though it’s just an organ, right, which we can choose to give away?  Whatever the avenue of speaking—it’s a mystical unexplainable avenue though for sure—I started laughing.  Why wouldn’t there be laughter here, I thought, with you?  And then I laughed some more.

“This is just my container, man,” I heard you say, more clearly and audibly than a phone call from a mile away.  “And I need you to help carry it for me tomorrow at the funeral.  Help put it into the ground until I need it later.  Do me that favor.”

Before going any further, I need to tell you how your body, at that moment, appeared to possess the density of a mysterious space rock fallen to earth.  It turns out, a mortuary is a place that collects space rocks, jackets them in flesh, and parades them as our loved ones.  A damn fine job they do.  And did on you.  But really, your well-reposed body was a message from beyond that you were at peace.  And in that peace there was a bit of a tease.  Of those who knew you, none of us would have been surprised, at any moment during the visitation, if you popped up and unleashed your signature Aahhhhh!

100 to 300 pounds.  The weight of an average casket.  Plus the loadstar space rock of your body.  Account for the strength stolen by grief and what’s left are eight men conveying your pall-draped coffin forward, triceps flexed, eyes on the ground as we shuffle our feet like elderly men in a chain gang.

But it’s not that we couldn’t bear your body and the (was it mahogany?) casket through the necessary motions of a funeral and burial.  It’s that things like this are always heavier than you think.  Dying is probably the same.  There’s no comprehension on the virgin side of it.  In your final moments, you tell your wife it’s okay, everything will be all right, and you slip away, and whatever happens next, it’s a first.  Death is probably lighter actually.  But all that’s conjecture.  What’s not conjecture is how heavy that wooden box of yours was, lifting it from the hearse the first time.  The triple digit heat didn’t aid one damn bit.  Why couldn’t you have shook off your coil midwinter rather than in the deep swelter of a Texas summer?

But what a fine tether through such an abstract passage, carrying the bones of a best friend still so green in the claw.  I’d have floated off into the ether otherwise. It’s enough to make me think I’m not invincible and immortal after all.  Benedictine, it is right and meet for us to remember, would instruct his monks to tell themselves every day that they would die.  Not a bad reminder to make you actually live.

But the physicality of the thing is what I was talking about.  Everyone pew-struck in their best Sunday black and we get to take you in and take you out, intimate with the hands-on reality of the eight-man task.  There’s a set-apart arrogance to being a groomsman, and I won’t lie by saying the self-importance of being a part of the beginning of a life at a wedding has its prideful opposite in helping send a life off at a funeral.  We even got front row seats, like secret service in black suits guarding your casket at the head of the church.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say, and I think I speak for the other seven, that we felt cheated by the wheels.  I wanted to ask the funeral director, you mean we aren’t going to actually carry him, manually? But it wasn’t the time for selfish hubris.  Yes, we used only our man-strength to extricate you from the haunted car.  We got to ascend a few steps.  But we were then instructed to place our load on what might as well have been an elongated room-service dolly.  The funeral director then walked backwards, guiding the casket like those little cars guide airplanes out of the gate.  And we all ambled along side, a hand on the actual funeral pall, which was a white sheet emblazoned with an ornate red cross.

With no pallbearers’ rehearsal dinner for this the day before, I kept waiting for more instructions on what to do, how to look, should I cry and show how much I miss you or should I appear strong for the rest of the mourners there gathered?  I chose the latter because I feared I might drop your casket if I cried.

On our way out, the Episcopal priest walked behind us praying and reading Scripture.  He was wirelessly mic’d and as were trying to squeeze all eight of us and your casket through the series of narrow doorways I wondered if the priests had tested the signal strength of their microphones.  Testing, testing.  The Lord be with you.  And also with you.  But what a fine way to exit.  With the Word of God at your head, your brothers at the front with your feet leading you to the life of day outside, your wife and parents behind the priest, your family and friends behind them, everyone in your wake whom you awoke with your life.  I was envious right then, I’ll admit.  I wanted to be Episcopal if only that I could give my future pallbearers such a moment when I shove off.

There’s a special audacity in a funeral procession of course.  Motoring from the church to the burial site, we were the most important vehicles on the road, cutting through intersections at will like we had the president in tow.  And for what that’s worth, I’d say your life had a bigger impact on people than most presidents could ever dream of.  As for the procession, what was most excellent was that, though they attempted to appear official in their law-like uniforms, the motorcycled escorts weren’t even lawmen.  They were, in my estimation, an overweight bouncer with a blonde pencil thin mustache, a black ex-cop deacon in love with his siren, and one or two additional rent-a-bikers who did their best to contain their excitement over being given the privilege of disrupting traffic on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.  These were the type of men who play softball and bingo and drink Pabst and take their kids to highway carnivals—all on the same day.  If given a fortnight to hand pick your escorts, all eight pallbearers could not have done better.

At the gravesite, we again were called upon, though this time it was all muscle, no dolly.  But leave it to you to be buried next to a gnarled up tree that would require us to dance around a network of roots in order to slide your load onto the casket support.  And all the time I’m thinking, it’s a hundred and two and we’re carrying a space rock that weighs more than the hearse.

But it wasn’t that we couldn’t bear it, as I said.  It wasn’t the weight at all.  It was the reality the weight gave.  Talking about how heavy it all was is just a way to make people think I’m special because I know from experience how heavy the business end of a casket is.

The weight of conveying you into and out of the church and of placing your bones atop your grave, the weight of being asked to do this along with your brothers and other best friends, is now a part of me like a scar stained into my flesh.  It’s like the phantom limb phenomenon.  We celebrated your life.  We interred you next to a tree straight out of Tolkien.  The flowers from our suits are riding atop your casket.  All this and more are memories that won’t be forgotten.  And yet in the palm of my right hand is the pressure of the brass casket rail, the weight of your life spent, your bones and flesh, whatever organs you didn’t donate, your funeral box and its cargo.

The burden we bore of course was mostly casket, the 100 to 300 pounds.  But the weight of our task, the weight of honoring your life by honoring you in death, is what won’t physically leave me.  And why would I ever want it to?

The saws stopped abruptly in shop class Tuesday and the school was almost evacuated when sophomore Brian Boles found a suspicious object on Mr. Wyndall’s desk.   Thinking the object was a frisbee, Brian slung it across the room and hit junior Dennis Dokes in the upper lip.   While tending to Dennis, a recent transfer student from rival Gartown High, Mr. Wyndall explained to the class that the “frisbee” was his favorite Boss Scaggs LP.  Randy, who had never seen a record before, served one day in ISS.

Choosing Dare over Truth during lunch yesterday in the inner quad, junior and self-proclaimed black belt Damien Timpson punched his fist through a concrete cinder block in the wall next to Mr. Faubion’s office window (the assistant principal has been out the last month following a corrective eye procedure).  To everyone’s amazement, Black Belt Timpson unearthed what the gathered students thought was a time capsule placed therein by an alumni class from long ago.  On hearing the commotion with her bat like sonar hearing, Cyretta Gorman sprinted all the way from B Hall and dragged Damien Timpson from the quadrangle by the ear while promising him detention and explaining to all that the “time capsule” was actually an old pay phone disconnected and walled up in the late 90′s.

Ebony Jones did not recognize an item in her plate lunch last week and caused the school to be temporarily locked down.  Thinking it similar to pictures she’d seen in her history or science class, she was sure it was a small grenade or a poisonous bug and screamed herself to the point of vomiting.  It turned out to be a vegetable and Ebony was not reprimanded for her actions.

Freshman and foreign exchange student Tony Shimazu had to spend half of last Thursday in the school infirmary after laughing himself out of consciousness. According to witnesses sitting nearby, Tony began laughing uncontrollably after hearing Coach Epperson explain with audacity that, “back in the old days,” students had to use manual, non-electric pencil sharpeners.  Tony Shimazu’s sister, senior Shimmy Shimazu, declined to comment.

Senior and starting defensive tackle on the football team Ellis Leiter, who students refer to as Leiter Than None, had to miss practice Monday after Earl Goodwood, the school’s longest tenured custodian, found the player stuck between a rock and a hard place in one of the storage rooms. Good Earl called Coach Pippendyke in to see the sight.  ”Lord a’mighty, Leiter,” the defensive line coach said to his heaviest and strongest but not brightest player, “you got yourself all bound up in an overhead projector!  Haven’t you ever seen one of those before?”  Ellis, who told Good Earl that he thought the contraption was an abdominal workout machine, was back in practice on Tuesday and tallied four sacks and injured all of the opposing team’s quarterbacks in Friday’s 38-3 victory over Highlands North.

Curious how grandmothers are said to drive.
Most grip the wheel in a fearsome squint,
lost or losing what lost means. Most are tired
of docking their “boats” between the shrinking
white bars of parking spaces.  Some maneuver
like syrup drips down table legs, time-deaf
and defiant, while others, and there are others,
move in faster lanes.

Mine sped and let me honk the horn
over and over, past Folkstone, down Rosa, Durango,
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
still stuck on our tongues from church.
Watch, she shouted through the rush of wind
the rolled down window let in, sending
her cupped palm into the invisible waves,
this is how you make a dolphin
of your hand.  And her pale ribbon-flimsy
arm surfed the wake of air carved out
by her coupe, an emerald green
blur to those it passed.

On turns, her watch would slip, encircle
her wrist, like time itself slipped
or raced across her skin and fled.
We fled, for sure, past cars tethered
to the curbs since Friday, under leaf
sagged limbs tunneling over the street,
through blossoming mists of water sprinklers,
her rose scented perfume, a thick overwhelming fog
which filled the cabin, now escaping
like a thought now forgotten.

Around her head, her silk scarf swam
and gasped for air.  It flapped but made no sound.
There was nothing audible in that Sabbath’s
three-minute drive from sanctuary
to weekly lunch, only the summer hot
wind swirl, the mirth I couldn’t
suppress, and the bright round sound
of the horn, its pitch cut short against
the parked cars we flew past,
then, pitch let loose, swelling
like an Easter alleluia.

All the while her sunsoaked grin
masked a pestilence I couldn’t have
known about, didn’t understand
until her flesh fell cold from dying,
death.  What seemed a casting off
of the hoary norm was a rebellion
against something greater,
something encroaching faster
than the past was being consumed
by the brief minutes of the present.

Explode the form of the slow footed elder,
certainly, but wrap it as a gift
of life to the young.  Endow them
with the mystical discipline of Sunday whimsy,
say nothing but say it with a smile, sear upon
that little mind trailing his hand in the breeze
a portion of your soul’s last breaths
in this time ravaged world.  Sounds are forgotten
until heard again.  The eye in the mind
is the ultimate retainer, no handmaiden
to the doppler effects of noise.  Praise Him
all creatures here below especially.  Praise Him
now to make a bridge across loss, to pave
a sure path between his now and his now later
and the one yet to come.  Don’t pass on
before you pass on how to tread lightly
upon the earth despite carrying your end like a seed
about to burst forth in spring.  Plant yourself
in his beginning.