MEMORIAM
One year after our father died, Mike selected a picture of Dad taken at a family cookout and posted it in the local paper, paired with a lovely quote from Shakespeare ("Full fathom five, thy father lies…") and some excellent words from Michael. So now the anniversary of Mike's passing approaches. I started looking through pictures and letters and etc., looking for the proper materials to compose such a memoriam for him as he did for our father. I had out a whole stack of letters from Mike, when I found the right quote. Then I located a good picture to use, and called the paper. Put the picture on CD, they said. Send it by email attachment with the quote. So I grabbed the photo and a couple of blank CDs. Grabbed the nearest envelope off the top of a stack of Mike letters, and stuffed the photos and CDs inside to protect them.
Got to Wal-Mart, and a woman Mike would have liked came up to ask what I needed at the photo counter.
"Can I put a hard copy picture on a CD here?"
"Not if it is a portrait," she said.
"It isn't," I assured her.
"No studio shots," she replied.
"It isn't a studio picture or a portrait," I said.
"We can't let you put anything copyrighted on CD," she countered.
Exasperated, I reached into the envelope, saying "It isn't a portrait or any kind of studio piece or copyrighted material. It is just a backyard snapshot, like this." And with that, I whipped the photo out of the envelope, and it WASN'T THE PICTURE OF MIKE. It was a picture FROM Mike, that he had mailed to me in 1984. Very pornographic. He knew I would take a dim view of it, but he thought it was funny. It was a naked woman with one of her knees pulled up against her chest, shooting up out of the ocean like a dolphin, with an orca coming up underneath, following her straight up out of the water as it were, with this HUGE tongue sticking out. It had a caption that said in all caps: WHALES WANT OUR WOMEN.
This created the closest thing to a sitcom moment I have ever personally enacted. My moment of whipping out the simple picture to punctuate her cavalcade of "can'ts," became a squawk and a bleat and a fumble…. Like…. Just a snapshot, like this…AGH….I mean…not like that (fumbling to cram it back out of sight into the envelope)…like THIS! (finally pulling out the simple picture of Mike in a green and yellow flowered shirt.) The overly made up young clerk, having clearly seen both pictures, looked at me very askance, and decided to put the picture on CD for me. She stood there at the machine, and for whatever reason, made like eight copies of Mike's picture in 4x6 size, and when she finally got the disk completed, she put it into an envelope and reached the stack of snapshot copies around the corner and apparently stowed them on the countertop inside her work area. I told her I would pay for all the extra copies she made, so just put them in the envelope and put them on the bill. She made no explanation for why she had made them, but only said there would be no charge for them.
I left with the CD, and opened it outside in the car. No charge for the snapshot copies, because she had kept them. I hated to think she would throw them away, so I started to go back in after them. But then I thought about how badly Mike had just embarrassed me at my neighborhood Wal-Mart. It was so much like he was alive again, that I decided to mind my own business and let the paisley-eyed clerk have her way with him. Just like him to wander off and vanish with the first slightly trashy tart we encountered on leaving the house.
So his memoriam is arranged. It will be in the Sunday Daily Times in Portsmouth, Ohio, on March 2nd. Two columns wide. Five inches long. A picture of Mike in the shadows under a shade tree, followed by something he said about the JFK murder. Something about important lives lived and completed in the shadows. I think he'd be pleased.
How his outing with the Wal-Mart clerk is treating him, is, I imagine, none of our business.
Ps. Arriving home from Wal-Mart, I found a photograph of the entire family in a lineup. Michael wearing the green and yellow flowered shirt. My father wearing the white turtleneck he wore in the picture Mike chose for his memoriam. So both Zempter men have been immortalized in the clothes they chose the morning of that same family cookout long ago. Immortality lurks where you least expect it.