Don’t let the children and widows hear this.

posted by Chuck Ayers

Voices coming from above.
Our weekends went something like this. Saturday early evening we kids would be near the big sycamore tree and home base in front of our house and out on the parkway between the sidewalk and curb by the street. My older brother would say when I count to three the last one to say ‘not it’ is it. So, when he counted to three, me being the youngest and a bit slow on the uptake often was it. And we were playing ‘hide and seek.’ So, what I had to do was lean up against the big tree hide my eyes in the crook of my elbow leaning against the tree and count to one hundred while the rest of our neighbor kids ran and hid. And so, it went.
By the time we were hot and sweaty my mom would yell out the front door…Sharron, Carl, Charles…come in now and take your Saturday night bath. Gotta get ready for Sunday church tomorrow.
My parents insisted we younger kids sit with them on the second row of pews and behave. So, my youngest sister and I sat with mom and dad. By the time we had two hymns and a prayer, I was quickly fading away and leaning up against my mother’s soft arm and slipping my head down into my mom’s cushy lap. The preachers pontifications didn’t seem to bother me as I snoozed.
Next door to our little church in East Los Angeles was McCormick’s funeral home. Our church was fortunate to receive dozens and dozens of hard paper fans stapled on a wood stick with McCormick Funeral home printed in bold letters. Good thing, our church had no ceiling fans.
The funeral home had two or three ambulances and was dispatched by two-way radio. The funeral home had a huge broadcast antenna to call the drivers of each ambulance.
But one Sunday morning while our preacher was in mid-homily a voice came out of the churches PA speaker of someone other than the preacher’s. “Larry, where in hell are you? Ya gotta get the Miller body from the downtown morgue and bring his body to the funeral parlor. So, get your ass moving!”
To say the least the preacher as well as the church goers were all dumb struck. Not knowing where the profane voice was coming from. But it didn’t take much discussion where the mystery voice emanated. One could only look at the fan in each hand and determine it came from the next-door funeral home. So, one of our church leaders the next day called the funeral home and admonished and exhorted the funeral director requesting that the dispatcher clean up his language. Not sure if our PA system could filter out the errant voices. The home must had changed frequencies because our church was not visited with mystery voices from that point on. Roger that!