Joe and Irv are business partners. They make a deal that whichever one dies first will contact the living one from the afterlife. So Irv dies. Joe doesn’t hear from him for about a year, figures there is no afterlife. Then one day he gets a call. It’s Irv. ‘So there is an afterlife! What’s it like?’ Joe asks. ‘Well, I sleep very late. I get up, have a big breakfast. Then I have sex, lots of sex. Then I go back to sleep, but I get up for lunch, have a big lunch. Have some more sex, take a nap. Huge dinner. More sex. Go to sleep and wake up the next day.’ ‘Oh, my God,’ says Joe says. “So that’s what heaven is like?’ ‘Oh no,’ says Irv. ‘I’m not in heaven. I’m a bear in Yellowstone Park.’
My mother found this hilarious letter among her things today. My grandmother was in a foul mood when she wrote it. I recalled this weekend like it was yesterday when I read the letter. Grandma was nosy. If she’d been an animal, she’d have been a ferret. She like to get right behind Daddy, quizzing him about his business and his family. “How come your mama moved off the Henderson Place? Seems like she was set up real well there. How come Ella May and her husband separated? They looked like they were doing good?” If she didn’t get enough answers, she picked us kids. “When did Suzie get married?” 
For my birthday, Mama made me an Indian outfit. By now, I’d been around the chickens long enough to know a mother hen would jump all over anyone getting near their chicks. I’d already been flogged trying it. This was different. In my Indian dress, I was brave and invincible. I played pretend in the yard shooting several buffaloes with my bow, saving the tribe from starvation, single-handedly. As I rode my horse, Midnight, bareback across the prairie, my long black braids flowed behind me. I had actually imagined myself up two horses. Midnight, a black stallion with a white mane and tail and Silver a white stallion with black mane and tail. If only I’d thought to imagine Silver was a mare, they could have created their own imaginary colt, but that never crossed my mind. They were both wild and would allow no one else to ride them. When I rode one, the other ran along with us. Deep in my fantasy, I slaughtered a bear and saved the chief, who by the way, was desperate to marry me. I was having none of it. I rode into the chicken yard, bravely scooping up a baby chick. Mother Hen ignored my two stallions, Indian dress, and the long black braids flowing behind me. In a split second, she was on my head, squawking, pecking, flogging, and scratching till I gladly dropped her baby. I’d never been so disillusioned in my life. That hen had no imagination whatsoever!!!
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