Headless Goats & Wrong-Headed Women

Evan Davidson of Inglewood, California, gazed upon what was supposed to be his beloved wife at rest in her lovely expensive casket and told the mortuary that they had the wrong woman; it wasn’t her head, even given being dead.

The news article didn’t mention whether or not he went on to check other body parts with which he had no doubt been familiar.  We may assume that he did not, since the morticians treated him like a doddering old fool and proceeded to bury the strange woman in his family plot.

Seems to me that being officially presented with Another Woman would be a lot more fun if she were alive.  A mistress isn’t much fun if you find her at the mortuary (even a die-hard bleeding-heart Eastern [much worse than Western] Democrat liberal like me has to draw the line somewhere.  I’ve got broad shoulders – I can risk alienating the necrophiliacs of this world).

Meanwhile, a suicide bomber killed ten spectators at an Afghan buzkashi match, “a game of horse polo played with a dead goat.”  It’s the national sport, and involves two teams trying to accumulate points by propelling a headless goat carcass to the scoring area.

Seems to me that a goat’s head would be a lot easier to swat through a goal post than its headless carcass. Why remove the head before the game, if not to use it as a ball as the Aztecs did?  And what happens to all those the goat heads?

Perhaps they’re tossed into major Chinese rivers alongside those 6,600 dead diseased pigs (none of which are officially affecting water quality a bit, according to government reports).

This week’s headlines raised heady questions:  Aren’t heads important?  And what about tails? After all, most of the week’s attention went to the selection of a new head of the Catholic church, about whom tales are already being told.

Now, surely a man knows the head of his wife of 51 years.  The Simpson Family Mortuary did finally acknowledge on Monday that the woman it buried on March 1 in Davidson’s wife’s plot was not in fact Davidson’s 82-year-old wife.  “We are not sweeping this under the rug,” mortuary spokesman Reginald Black said in a statement.  Nope.  They buried this, six feet under.

I thought of Husband’s parents, married for almost 60 years (and perhaps happily so for one or two).  Mother-In-Law told me many times that she knew the minute she was dead Clyde Jr. would have some other woman in there, “using all her stuff.”  She knew all sorts of women were just waiting to pounce, since he used to flirt shamelessly with grocery clerks and medical secretaries and physical therapists. It didn’t seem to be the using of Clyde Jr. himself that she objected to – just the using of her other Stuff.

When I reported this to Husband, he agreed that his father was indeed quite a catch – deaf, ill, narrow-minded, mean, miserly, and querulous.  Who wouldn’t be smitten?  Male On The Hoof gets scarce in the upper regions of age, and there are a lot of lonely widows out there.

You will be pleased, in a retributive sort of way, to know that Husband pays dearly for these remarks.  His father visits often in his dreams, wanting finally to spend time together; he has all the time in the next world, now.

Clyde Jr., for his part, did his part to keep his jealous wife forever on edge.  On his deathbed, in hospice care, it was suggested to the family that continued dialysis was pointless and cruel.  Clyde Jr. lashed out at his still-insecure wife, “Bernice, if you do this, we’re through!  We’re finished! Do you hear me? We’re through!”

You’ve got to admire a man who’s that sure of himself.

So who speaks up for the dead?  The sportscast-off goats and the sodden swollen pigs and the swapped wives?  (We won’t get into the seriously dead – those news articles are too hard to read.)

Perhaps the new Pope will – we expect miracles from him.  Miracles are hard to document in the 21^st century.  Even illiterate gullible peasants have cell phones with cameras (I finally got one, after all).

As for me?  The new pope is a new martyr, thrown with a pitchfork into to the curious waters of the curia and crucified in the glare of the world’s attention.  The Church needed a sacrificial lamb.

He’s at least not a sacrificial goat – no reports of sexual misconduct thus far, although I did see an article today that dredged up some woman who received a love note from him at age 12.  That note was pretty hot as she remembers it, by God – a childish drawing of a house, saying that when they were married, they’d share it.

Is that the best the journalists could do?

Rome is playing buzkashi with Francis I.  And he’ll be buried in the wrong grave, the scapegoat for the woes of the modern Church.  God bless him.