You Think Weird
Recently, I tried to convince a kid on my block that the soap bubbles he was blowing were his captured thoughts drifting up to outer space and that aliens were collecting them and storing them in a glittering galactic library. He stared at me for a long moment, then said, “You think weird.”
Grown-ups assess me similarly, if less eloquently. Pondering some skewed notion of mine, I’ve heard more than once, “What in god’s name is wrong with your brain?”
I want to suggest that nothing I’ve written for the Swarthmorean is fiction. Put another way – maybe the stuff I write didn’t actually happen . . . but it could have. And that’s real enough for me.
My dance with reality has everything to do with my heritage. To put a high sheen on it: I was born in the South and I am part of a great literary tradition: Southern Gothic literature. I love the following definition from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia: “Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational and transgressive thoughts; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation.” Hello, me!
Here is an abridged version of a true story, which I maintain is no different from the irrational, transgressive, angst-ridden humor I routinely write.
My father, Hennig Cohen, was born in South Carolina in 1919, and died of cancer in his home on Amherst Avenue in 1996. In between, he was an Eagle Scout, a decorated WWII radio-gunner on a B-17, and a professor of English at Penn. He was drawn to the humorously strange and the profoundly gothic, so of course he taught American Literature, covering all the weirdos: Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Faulkner, and especially Herman Melville. Though he was fond of my mother, and rather liked his three sons, the most important figure in my father’s life was a one-legged maniac who captained a doomed whaling ship.
“Moby-Dick” ends with the entire crew of the Pequod, save one, lost to the sea. Ishmael survives, bobbing in watery vastness, clinging to an empty coffin. In December of 1996, when I misplaced my father’s corpse, that image was much on my mind.
If that last sentence made you squirm, rest assured that my father would have adored the true story of how his youngest son bungled the simple job of disposing of a body. Like Mark Twain, Dad loved anecdotes of hallowed moments gone haywire. I can almost hear his mellifluous South Carolina accent, perfect for tale-telling, as he recounts to the other angels in Heaven, “And I’ll be damned, my nitwit son, tasked with the simple mission of cremating my earthly body . . .”
So it’s 1996, Dad was nearing the end. Surely, I had lined up a funeral home in advance? But that kind of pragmatism felt a little . . . too prepared? Then suddenly, it was over – his death expected yet so unexpected – and in emotional disarray, I searched through the funeral home ads in the phone book, and chose a 1-800-cremation service. (I was raised no-frills, what can I say?)
And it all went so well . . . at first. A hearse showed up with two undertakers, properly lugubrious. In 20 minutes, my father was on his way. In my distress, I waved to the vanishing hearse. What I should’ve done was jot down the license plate.
Five days later, I went to Patterson Funeral Home in Media to pick up Dad’s ashes.
The funeral director cocked his head. Paged through a large, dark book. Frowned. “I’m sorry, we have no record of . . . a Hennig Cohen.”
You know in a badly written novel when the character “gasps audibly” and “breaks into a sweat”?
“Well . . . where is he?” I gasped sweatily.
The funeral director shrugged. Shrugged!
I spent two frantic days on the phone with the 1-800 people. They kept insisting Dad was in Media. Until they didn’t. Oops, so sorry – clerical error. Turns out, to keep prices low they had contracts with multiple funeral homes.
I jumped in my car, and raced to the right place – a funeral home in Norwood, off MacDade Boulevard. The guy at the desk was hesitant to hand over Dad’s ashes, because I was reaching for the cardboard box with such a greedy, sweaty, gasping panic.
I stumbled out to the parking lot. At the same moment, a teary woman exited the business adjoining the funeral home. The sign above the door read: “Pets in Heaven.” She too clutched a weighty cardboard box. Rottweiler ashes? German Shepherd? Or . . .?
She stared at my box. And I at hers. The question I dared not ask: When she had called around for a doggy cremation service, did she by any chance dial a 1-800 number to get the best deal?
As I say, I’m from the South, and we think weird.
Writer Jon Cohen lives in Swarthmore.
