Sharon Creech - Absolutely Normal Chaos

“Maybe they should, Sam,” my mom said.

“Hmm.”

“Oh, pleeeease,” said Dennis.

“Well, I’m not going!” said Maggie.

“I wanna go!” said Tommy. He didn’t even know where we were going.

Carl Ray, of course, didn’t say anything. He must have been wondering if he was still going to have a job now, with Mr. Furtz dead and all.

“Well, fine then. You can come, but behave yourselves.”

So we’re all going tomorrow. Except for Maggie and Carl Ray, I guess.

Beth Ann finally called. Surprise, surprise. She said she was sorry she hadn’t called sooner, but she’s been so busy . I didn’t ask her what she was busy doing.

She asked me what I was doing tomorrow night. Well, I’ve fallen for that one before, so I was happy that I had something to say. “Going to the funeral home,” I said. I knew she’d be surprised. She wanted to know who was there, and I told her it was Mr. Furtz, our new neighbor. She asked if he was dead. Of course he was dead, I told her.

I feel terrible about Mr. Furtz. I keep expecting to see him outside, puttering around his yard. I told my parents they ought to take some vitamins.

Here’s some Odyssey notes to take my mind off Mr. Furtz. I’ll write them in red ink.

I tried to read the Odyssey today, but I couldn’t get past the first couple of pages. Homer writes so strangely. He begins, “Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.” Doesn’t that sound a little much?

Fortunately, I knew what a Muse was from English last year. A Muse is a goddess who sits around inspiring people whenever she feels like it. If you’re telling a story and don’t feel too inspired, you’re supposed to call on the Muse for help. It looks like Homer needed some help right from the start. If I were Homer, I don’t think I’d admit that right at the beginning of the story.

And then I just can’t warm right up to a character who is a hero (an ingenious hero) because he “sacked” a town! Lord.

Homer also has a strange way of putting things. For example, instead of saying, “He visited many cities,” Homer will say, “Many cities did he visit.” It reminds me of the preacher at Aunt Radene’s church in West Virginia. He would make his voice really soft and then, boom, he would be shouting and then soft again. And he would say things like “Many people did our Jesus cure,” and “Little did He know.” You could tell that this preacher really liked to talk and that he was really proud of what he said and the way he said it.

Anyway, about all I can make out from the first part of the Odyssey is that it’s going to be about this man Odysseus who “sacked” Troy and then started on his way home but all these gods are trying to decide if they should let Odysseus get started on his journey home to his wife. Then you find out that back at his wife’s house a bunch of men are falling all over her, waiting for the opportunity to marry her. It’s like a soap opera!

It just kills me the way these gods decide everything. Here’s this big hero Odysseus and everything he does is because the gods decide he should do it.

I keep wondering if there are still all these gods like Zeus and Athene and Poseidon sitting around up there on Mount Olympus deciding if I should go to Mr. Furtz’s funeral or, even worse, deciding when it was time for Mr. Furtz to die. Are they saying, “Should Mary Lou Finney die today?”

“Well, yes, I think she should, because many people has she slighted of late.”

“Well, I don’t agree,” says another one. “She’s a good kid. Let us halt awhile.” Etc.

Also, I have trouble keeping track of all the names. In the first three pages, just to give you an idea of why I have trouble, here are the names mentioned: Hyperion, Zeus, Odysseus, Calypso, Poseidon, Ethiopians, Aegisthus, Agamemnon, Orestes, Hermes, Athene, Cronus, Atlas, Polyphemus, Cyclopes, Thoosa, Phorcys, Telemachus, Penelope, Mentes, Taphians.

I was reading this in the living room after dinner while Carl Ray was watching TV, and I got so frustrated, I just threw the book down and said, “Telemachus! Who the heck is Telemachus?”

And do you know what Carl Ray did? He said, without even looking away from the TV, “The son of Odysseus.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. “And how do you know that ?” I asked.

“Simple,” he said, and he kept right on watching The Dating Game .

I didn’t even think Carl Ray knew how to read .

I will never forget tonight as long as I live (and hey, Zeus, I would like that to be quite a bit longer, please).

We viewed Mr. Furtz tonight.

I don’t know where to start. I never expected anything like this. First of all, DiMaggio’s Funeral Home is really like a home inside. I guess I thought it would be like a hospital with green walls and tile floors and people in white coats. But it was like a house, with a living room where people were standing around talking. There were lamps and tables and couches and all that. When I saw the living room, I thought for a minute that they were going to have Mr. Furtz propped up in a chair with a newspaper in his lap. Dentist-office music was playing in the background.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, surprise, surprise, guess who came along with us. Carl Ray! None of us could I believe it when we were walking down the street (like I said, the funeral home is only two blocks away) and all of a sudden Dougie said, “Hey, there’s Carl Ray!” We all turned around, and sure enough, Carl Ray was following right behind us.

“Now that’s one strange boy,” my father whispered to my mother.

Anyway, Dennis started pulling on my arm at the funeral home, and Carl Ray said, “Come on.” I don’t know why I was so surprised to see Carl Ray lead the way, but we followed him. We went through some curtains and there it was.

The coffin. It was sitting up on a table and it was open ! Dennis said, “Whooaa.” Carl Ray stepped right up and pulled Dennis beside him. Dennis dragged me.

I couldn’t breathe. There was Mr. Furtz, lying on this white silky pillow with his hands folded over his chest. He was wearing a brown suit and a white dress shirt and tie. And he had this fancy quilt over him, covering his legs. It seemed strange to see a man in a suit lying in this box that was trying to look like a bed.

He really did look like he was sleeping, and he looked pretty much like Mr. Furtz except he wasn’t smiling as he usually did, and his face looked like it had powder on it. I kept thinking he was going to open his eyes and be real mad that we were all staring at him.

I never saw so many flowers all in one room before. There were flowers in the coffin (“To Charles Randolph Furtz, With love from your children”), baskets of gladiolas all along a shelf behind the coffin, and then about a hundred other baskets of flowers around the room.

I started looking at these baskets, because each one had a card on it telling who it was from. The cards said things like “In loving memory” and “Rest in peace” and “To our Beloved.” They were all pretty depressing. It was as if people were cramming in all these last-minute messages in case Mr. Furtz could still hear. The funny thing was he looked as if he could hear. I kept looking at the cards, wishing at least one of them would say the truth: “Oh how awful!” or “I wish you weren’t dead” or “This is the absolute worst thing in the world.” But none of them did.

When I turned around to show Dennis, Carl Ray was staring down into the coffin and rubbing his finger over this brass marker on the side of the coffin. The marker had Mr. Furtz’s initials on it: CRF. But then I saw Carl Ray reach out with one hand and touch Mr. Furtz on the arm! “Carl Ray!” I said.