After the usual pleasantries with the local mortician at Marshall’s Funeral Home, updating him on my latest report card and confirming that art is still my favorite class, it was time to get to the business of stealing candy.

I spent much of my childhood in the funeral home.  Grandparents, great grandparents, Sunday school teachers, cousins, friends, people I’d never met: it was a rotation of faces in the same glossy box with the same bouquets and the same cast of characters on either side of the receiving line.  Old ladies clucked their tongues and old men shook their heads while my friends and I ran rampant in the cool downstairs basement, experimenting with powdered coffee creamer in our tea and spooking ourselves with the infant coffins kept in the back room we weren’t allowed in, but always found ourselves shooed out of.

My father led the protocol of laughter…