(Continuing my series of old posts reposted.)
It was a warm evening, with drinks to match. We were relaxing in the garden of a local pub, toasting the end of a well-received musical production we’d been involved in these last few nights.
It was then that we saw it arrive. No ordinary car being driven into the pub grounds, it was a hearse.
Ribald comments flashed around our group, jokers trying to top each preceding witty remark. Until the hearse passed our table, and one of our number realised: the people in the hearse were friends of his.
“What are you doing with a hearse?” he asked his friends.
“Oh, we’ve just bought it.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to take a holiday touring Europe, and wanted a vehicle where whoever wasn’t driving at night would have room to lie down and sleep.”
Now what would you have given to have been a border guard on the European mainland, maybe Romania, somewhere near – oh, for argument’s sake, Transylvania? You go round to the back of the hearse, peer in, and someone rises from the catafalque. And what if the person who had been disturbed from sleep and was now getting up had not had American standards of dental work?
Sometimes life comes out of nowhere and grabs you. Sometimes all your preconceived ideas get thrown out of the window.
I like the story of the man who was convinced he was dead. He told his wife, his friends, his work colleagues.
So persistent was he that they became very worried about him. As you would.
Finally they clubbed together to pay for him to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist set about his work diligently. Using medical textbooks, he proved to the man one simple fact: dead men don’t bleed.
“OK, OK, I accept what you’re saying,” said the man, “Dead men don’t bleed.”
At which point the psychiatrist produced a lancet and jabbed it into the man’s flesh.
As blood throbbed out, the man looked in horror: “Maybe dead men do bleed after all.”
Got any preconceived ideas that need a decent burial? About God, for example?
Big Circumstance 