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Historical Summer 2005 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
As a public service, your friendly columnist is always looking to offer relevant information to help you fend with life’s vicissitudes.
In the past this column has offered proactive advice on such matters as national elections, rising gasoline prices, and broken glass in the alleys.
While none of us can predict the future accurately, there are two inevitable things with which we must all deal.
This month’s column is not about taxes. You read it here, first.
In Your Ear prepares you for the inevitable. None of us are immortal.
We may fool Mother Nature (and ourselves) with Botox or steroids, by having plastic surgery and working our regularly, through placing sliced limes on our eyelids when we sleep, or by subsisting on a diet of wine, Hostess cupcakes, and Chinese food. Effective as these strategies are, though, they are all mere short-term measures.
While they can enable you to look younger (the aforementioned diet has done wonders for me, if I say so myself), your internal clock keeps a-ticking (at least until it stops ticking). Sooner or later we are all just memories, and as it gets later, being a memory comes sooner. OK, so it’s happened. You’ve checked out.
The ball game’s over, and the Fat Lady has sung. You had a good life but it’s past-tense. Hopefully you were kind and caring. Hopefully you made a difference in the world, however slight. Hopefully you enjoyed yourself.
But that’s history; indeed, you’re history.
Now what? Scenario #1: You feel like you’ve awakened from a long nap. You’re a bit groggy and find yourself rubbing your eyes. You can vaguely make out muted background music; the Rolling Stones are singing “You can’t always get what you want.” How’s that for an appropriate song? Suddenly it gets very, very bright and you find yourself squinting. Without walking, you realize that you’ve moving forward. Motion stops and you are face to face with a pearly gate. At least they look like pearls – or are they video monitors?
On stage left, there’s an avuncular guy, wearing a bathrobe over a tuxedo with pink granny glasses, and a Cardinals baseball cap.
He has a flowing gray beard almost to his waist and is smoking a cigar.
It hits you: these are THE Pearly Gates, a proper noun.
It doesn’t seem that he’s noticed you yet, and you can make out that he’s thumbing through a copy of “Popular Mechanics.” You clear your throat and he looks up, simultaneously putting his magazine on the podium which you hadn’t noticed before. Like the gates, it’s made of television monitors – or are those pearls? You note that there’s a name tag on his bathrobe. “Hello” it says in bright red letters; beneath that someone has written Pete.
He smiles and you are a bit comforted. You almost feel as if he is going to ask you for your wish list of Christmas wants. Instead, he greets you by name and asks how you’re doing. Odd, you think to yourself, his mouth never opened but he talked to me! You hear, “Moving mouths is inefficient.
We don’t need to do that here,” and you again note that his lips were still. “No, it’s not a dream,” he says before you even finish framing the question in your mind. Anyway, you stand there a bit awed, reflecting on how quickly your life passed you by and wondering what’s next. Suddenly a huge book appears on the podium. You gasp because your name is on the cover. It’s a pretty thick book and you hope that this means something good. Pete says to you, “Yes, this is you, all 312 pages.” You wonder if there are photos.
While Pete thumbs through the book that lists all of your deeds, misdeeds, and mrdeeds, you surreptitiously glance around to see who else is on the cloud. Questions rumble through your mind. “I wonder if I’ll see my dad? Is Winston Churchill here? What about Elvis? Can I get Mother Theresa’s autograph?
I know she’s here! Do I get any credit for all the times I thought about doing good things even though I didn’t follow through?” Pete clears his throat and the Stones stop singing.
It gets very quiet. Very quiet. “In general,” he says, pausing, lips still motionless, “you led a pretty nice life.” A sense of relief floods over you. Is it your imagination, or has it just gotten quite windy?
His bathrobe is rustling and the cigar smoke is wafting furiously.
He takes off his glasses and peers into your eyes, looking a bit stern.
The pages in your book begin to flip madly.
If you had a pulse, it would be thundering. “But there are some issues that need to be addressed before,” he pauses and takes a drag from his cigar, “before you can pass through here,” and he nods to the gates. You wait for what seems like an eternity, then you think, “Wait, this is an eternity!” The next several minutes – or maybe it’s hours or days or weeks, months, or years, you’re not really sure – are spent with Pete dredging up events from your past.
The specifics aren’t important, but the general points apply to all of us: Were you a kind person? Did you pick up trash and throw it away? Did you take the time to listen to others? Did you go out of your way to help others? How is the world better because you passed through?
The good news is that Pete is a fair grader.
He doesn’t grade on the abstract or use Mother Theresa as an icon.
He simply asks and ascertains if you did what you could and if you stretched to help others. (One tip for your remaining days on terra firma: the little things are the big things!) After the questioning period, Pete smiles and nods, standing aside to let you pass. You should feel a sense of relief but you don’t. By now, glorious as it is, it’s not a surprise. You knew that it was coming. You walk forward and all of a sudden are embraced by music, warmth, and emotion.
The Stones are still singing but they’re louder (but trust me, they’re only there through the magic of digital recording), and it feels all warm and comfy, womb-like.
All of a sudden faces start appearing. It’s your old relatives and friends, the people who departed the real world and whom you thought you’d never see again.
But wait, there’s someone you love and you know this person is alive! “What gives?” you wonder, and a voice comes into your head: relax, this is all about you and for you. Suddenly you see John F. Kennedy playing tennis with Ben Franklin. And look, there’s Martin Luther King, Jr. talking with Edgar Allen Poe and Eleanor Roosevelt! Babe Ruth is giving batting tips to Cleopatra.
She has one mean swing. You’re overwhelmed and frozen in place, when all of a sudden you hear, “Want to go for a walk?” and you see that the words were uttered by Abe Lincoln. Yes, he’s wearing his hat. You begin to stroll forward and find yourself joined by Marilyn Monroe, Helen Keller, Gandhi, and someone wearing a name tag that says Plato.
This is going to be fun, you think to yourself, as you begin to sip wine, eat a Hostess cupcake, and sample the Chinese food. Next month: Option #2. What’s that like???
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2005.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2005_06.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
