And in this corner...

Lest I give the impression that we did not enjoy the wedding we attended last weekend, let me assure you that we did. Not only did we have our choice of delicious entrees at the reception, we also had our choice of scintillating conversation at our table, split basically along gender lines. Our choices were:

Men
Dead bodies

Ladies
Makeup

You can see what a dilemma I personally faced in deciding which of these topics of conversation to follow. For a time I tried to follow both, but when they started to run together and I began hearing things on the relative ease or difficulty of putting makeup on dead people, I decided it was perhaps better to concentrate on eating my dinner.

The topic of dead bodies was started innocently enough by the young man seated to my left, who upon hearing that we live in a historic district claimed an immediately bond with us, on the grounds that he was at present rehabbing an old building in Gettysburg. People who live in old places have this sort of kinship, permanent membership in the Order of Those Who Live in Homes with No Square Walls, and who fight the enemy known as some variation of The Historic Board.

I naturally asked the young man what sort of building he was rehabbing. I imagined it to be something like a bank, a government building, perhaps an old-factory-turned-Haven-for-the-Poor-Huddled-Masses. Even, maybe, a private home.

"It's, um, actually a funeral home," he said.

I suppose this places the blame for the dead body conversation squarely on me, although I'm sure this information would have surfaced some other way even without my intervention.

Yet we still pictured him as the developer of this project. It was several minutes before we realized that he, and his family, owned the funeral home. And operated it.

There are moments in our lives when what we have believed turns out to be completely false, and changes our entire outlook on life. One of these is discovering that Santa is not real. Another is finding out that a young, healthy man of relatively favorable countenance is, by choice, a funeral director.

Of course he had faced the same slack jaws he saw on us at this moment many times before. He hastened to say that he had done several other jobs before settling into the family business. He taught high schools for four years. Almost went into finance with a well-known firm.

This last bit of knowledge was too much for Joe. "You almost went into finance??" he said with incredulity, pained that someone could turn down an incredible opportunity in the field dearest to his own heart for...a career in working with dead people.

This motivated the man to explain his choice. Spurred on by further questions from Joe and another man at the table -- "Do you, like, like dead people?" "Do you love horror movies?" "You really almost went into finance?" -- he assured us that his occupation involved very little actual hands-on time with dead bodies (that is what he called it -- hands-on), which he estimated to be about 5%, and mostly time with families and paperwork.

His date, although showing small signs of distress throughout this conversation, seemed more concerned with the fact that the topic was diverting him from consuming his soup. Failing to communicate to him, by a series of gestures, that he should stop talking and eat, she gave up and commenced taking surreptitious spoonfuls of it herself, in between making contributions to the ladies' topic of conversation, which had begun sometime around when her date had started explaining the intricacies of funeral paperwork.

From his specific situation the man moved into a rather impassioned oratory on death. "This is a death-denying society," he said forcefully. "People don't want to --"

Here he was interrupted by his date, who, desperate to spare us all from a lecture on the cultural views of death, shoved her camera at the young man and insisted that he take a picture of her and her friend next to her, now. When that was accomplished, she insisted that he eat his soup -- or what remained of it -- now.

And the rest of us were left to listen to the merits of Clinique High-Impact Mascara vs. Bare Escentuals Buxom Lash.