Then And In The End; A Cement Mixer.

My first memory of death is remarkable in its non-chalance.

I was probably 5 years old. I played a lot with a kid named Sammy Ferrante who lived two doors down. The Ferrantes had lived in the neighborhood for many years. They lived with their grandparents. Sammy's Mom was Dorothy. Dorothy was the first Mom that I knew who didn't have a husband. She had a brother named Chuckie who was the first teenager with whom I became "friends". I knew Grandma and Grandpa Ferrante. I even called them Grandma and Grandpa because I thought that was part of their name. Sammy had a baby sister named Lydia. When we were older, we used to scare Lydia. We would sneak up on her and start saying "Dah, Dah, Dah, FOREVER". I don't know if she was actually scared or whether she liked the attention and pretended to be scared.

One day, I got up to play with Sammy. My mother told me that Sammy wouldn't be able to play that day, which wasn't real unusual. Kids were always being forced to "stay in" because of some infraction like staying out after the streetlights went on. 

The next day, I went out to play. My mother asked me where I was going. I told her over to the Ferrantes. She stopped me and told me that Sammie was dead.

Hmmmm

That messed up my plans for the morning.

I asked how he died.

Mom told me that he got run over in his driveway while playing behind a cement mixer.

Oh.....

A cement mixer?........

I barely knew what a cement mixer was.

Ookkaay. Well I'll go see if Kippy and Paulie or Butchie and Terry can play.

Which I did and they could and we did.

We might have talked about Sammie a little bit that day but I don't rememember much of a conversation. We were Cowboys and Indians.

Sammy was dead, whatever that was.

We were alwways getting killed in our games. Someone would grab their heart and say "Ya got me" and roll down the hill. Five minutes later that someone was back in the game.

Within a couple weeks Sammie was forgotten. I was closer to Sammy then were the other kids. I played on both sides of the street. The other kids stayed on their side. They didn't know Sammy and Sammy didn't know them.

I don't remember seeing Grandma and Grandpa Ferrante very much after that although a few years later, Chuckie went to jail which surprised everybody in the neighborhood. I never found out why Chuckie went to jail. He was just gone...kinda like Sammie but not forever. Chuckie showed up once in a while when we were teenagers. He's come down to the field and throw a ball aginst a fence. To evrynody else, he was kinda dangerous and odd but not to me. He had simply gone away and comeback.

Obviously, I've given this situation quite a bit of thought as I've grown older and death beacme more of a reality. I started to associate death with a cement mixer that comes out of nowhere when you're playing nd then you're gone. Then I went to St. James and started learning all about heaven and hell and sin and forgiveness and most complex of all.....ETERNITY.

I had a hard time imagining "forever" even though I was familiar with tales of Cinderlela and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty who lived happily ever after which I at first thought was forever until I realized that "happily ever after"  only applied to whatever happened in your life from the time whatever it was happened until the time that you died...that's when forever took over and then once you grasped the concept of forever eternity took over. Forever is just the beginning of an endless parade of forevers thta only scratch the surface of eternity whcih is only a moment from "here".

That's when I started to re-examine eternal Sammy's afterlife. The one we're all gonna have.

And to think the whole thing started with a cement mixer.

Now that I' a writer, I'm always tempted to end my stories with

AND THEN HE GOT RUN OVER BY A CEMENT MIXER.

Once, while writing about a dog, I couldn't resist the temptation which might have seemed even more bathetic than it really was without this as a prologue.

This time I decided to begin the story with a cement mixer as an invitation for me to poner the meaning of death and for you to come along with me as an exhibition of our appreciation for our consciousness which differentiates us from animals, vegetabler and minerals

and cement mixers.