Chapter 11: Ed McMahon
Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Chapter 6. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. Chapter 9. Chapter 10.
The truth is, I’ve been dead nearly two decades now. It’s not so bad being dead. In fact, it’s rather peaceful. And Ed McMahon has stopped sending me junk mail.
But with Liz around it was difficult being dead. For one thing, I needed a phone again, so that she could call me whenever she had a moment. She usually just called to say “hello,” but sometimes she called to ask me if I weren’t feeling a bit more alive today.
“A bit,” I’d say.
“Well, that’s a start,” she’d say.
“Will you be stopping by later?”
“That depends. Do you have any Velveeta Cheese and blackberry jelly sandwiches?”
“No. But I can make some if you’d like.”
“Do,” she’d say. “And I’ll bring the wine.”
I guess you could say Boone’s Farm wine, strawberry, and Velveeta Cheese with blackberry jelly sandwiches, made both of us feel a bit more alive.
And the sex didn’t hurt, either.
****
Chapter 12
That second paragraph carries surprising strength for coming so early.
The mix of “in-your-face-unbelievability” and poignancy reminds me of some of my favorite writers. Bananas and rockets.
Cheers.
I’m assuming that if he can land a pretty twenty-something, the .44 didn’t do too much damage.
By the way, I’d been skipping this part of your blog until today and all of a sudden I’m hooked.
Skipping posts was your first mistake. Protein Wisdom shouldn’t be thought of as a series of self-contained posts to some blog; rather, it should be thought of as one long narrative arc generated by a sophisticated Turing machine that was accidentally fed Mrs. Wooley’s library.