Show and Tell

Despite my joshing, I never really did much in the way of booze or drugs in my youth. I have my dad to thank for that.

When I was 17, he got me a job at a local funeral home. I grew up in the Deep South, and most funeral homes ran their own ambulance services. We were NOT EMTs (I don’t think the term had been invented then.) Our ambulances were retired or semi-retired hearses with no equipment to speak of, and almost none of us had any training.

If you were alive when you got to the ER it was because God wasn’t ready for you yet, not because of any skill of ours. Dad got me the job just as my cohorts were starting to experiment with alcohol, drugs, and fast cars. I’d pull dead people I knew out of crashed cars and thought “Yeah, THAT looks like fun.” I was in my 30s before it struck me that was my father’s intent. Foxy devil. He would have known that mere lectures and threats weren’t going to cut it for me. It had to be show and tell. Thanks, Dad.