Butthole Stuffing

Strange. Unusually you can shoot a cannonball from one end of the hallway to the next in there. My first thought was that someone had died and they didn’t want the rest of the residents to know. But thankfully I was wrong. The signs were urging everyone “If you have the flu or have been exposed to the flu, please do not enter”. I glanced at the sign, thought I was good to go and strolled past the nurse’s station toward my 84 year old Grandma’s room.

I got to the end of the long hallway only to discover she had escaped. Now where would she be? I hoped my suspicions were not correct but I had to find out. So I followed my ear. Sure enough, there she was. I peeked into the cafeteria that had been set up as a makeshift concert hall and Daisy Pearl was sitting smack dab in the middle of a sparsely populated crowd singing, “Shall We Gather At The River”. She caught me looking in to see if she was present so I had to precede center court as she motioned for me to come in and take a seat next to her wheelchair. She was so excited to see me and to share this experience. The music was so depressing but the series of events to follow lifted me to a higher place.

I took my seat next to her and looked toward the organ player. He was probably in his late sixties, dressed head to toe in light blue denim and missing every third note he tried to find. Standing to his right was what I would later discover was his wife. They were newlyweds and my Grandma informed me that her last husband had been a much better organ player. In her right hand the lady gripped a microphone attached to a karaoke machine she had apparently brought from home. They made a perfect pair. He searched for the notes while she searched for the tune. They continued to sing a few more songs as I sat next to my Grandma feeling overcome with sadness with their attempts to cheer the crowd with the ever-popular tune, “I’ll Fly Away”. After every song, the woman, in her light blue sweatshirt covered in silver snowflakes, would let the mainly catatonic crowd know that “Ralph” would be playing his big finish in just a few minutes and then they would have to go. I was certain he had selected Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” to really rip the roof off the joint or something equally as uplifting by Cher. But at last, it was nothing more than a jumble of notes he had pieced together that sounded a lot like a melody mixer and a five-year-old.

Once Ralph finished his finale, and we all prayed together, Snowflake let the crowd know it had been a real treat for them to be there that week but they would not be back the next week due to a trip they had planned to go deep sea fishing in Florida.