Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

The Elevator Ride

Elner was wondering when that elevator was ever going to stop and let her out. This was the craziest elevator she had ever been on in her life! Not only did it go up, the thing zigzagged, spun around, and went sideways. When it finally did stop, and the doors opened, she didn’t recognize the place at all. Nothing looked familiar. “Lord, the crazy thing must have taken me clear over to some other building.” This was certainly not the hospital where she had been, and it was a nice enough building, but she had no idea where she was. For all she knew, she could be clear across town, all the way over to the courthouse. “Well, I’m for sure lost now,” she said to herself as she headed on down the hall, looking for someone to help her get back to the hospital. “Yoo hoo!” she called out. “Anybody here?” She had walked for quite a while when she suddenly saw a pretty blue-eyed blond lady rushing down the hall toward her, carrying a pair of black tap shoes and a white feather boa.

“Hey,” said Elner. The lady smiled at her and said, “Hello, how are you?” but she went by her so fast, Elner didn’t have a chance to ask where she was. A few seconds after the lady passed, Elner thought to herself that if she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn the woman was Ginger Rogers! She knew exactly what Ginger Rogers looked like because she had always been Elner’s favorite movie star, and Dixie Cahill, who had run the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl in Elmwood Springs, where Linda had taken dancing, had a big picture of the dancer up in her dance studio. But the more she thought about it, she realized that even though the woman was the spitting image of Ginger Rogers, it couldn’t have been her. What in the world would Ginger Rogers be doing in Kansas City, Missouri? It didn’t make any sense, but then she suddenly remembered, Ginger Rogers was originally from Missouri, so even if it wasn’t her, it was for sure one of her relatives.

Elner kept walking and was admiring how clean and white the marble walls and the floors were. “Norma should see this,” she thought. “This would be a building after her own heart.” So clean you could eat off the floor, that’s what Norma liked, but why anyone would want to eat off the floor was a mystery to Elner. A few minutes later, she began to see a little speck of something way down at the end of the hall, and as she got closer, she was relieved to see it was a person, sitting at a desk in front of a door. “Hey,” she called.

“Hey, yourself,” the person called back.

When Elner finally reached the end of the hall and got up close enough to actually see who the person behind the desk was, she could hardly believe her eyes. It was none other than her youngest sister: Norma’s mother, Ida! There she sat as big as life, all dressed up, wearing her fox furs and her good strand of pearls, and earrings.

“Ida?” she said. “Is that really you?”

“It is indeed,” said Ida, eyeing Elner’s old brown plaid robe with disdain.

Elner was flabbergasted. “Well, heavens to Pete…What in the world are you doing here in Kansas City? We all thought you were dead. Good Lord, honey, we had a funeral for you and everything.”

“I know,” said Ida.

“But if you’re here, who was that woman we buried?”

Ida instantly got that certain little look she got when she was displeased, which was most of the time. “Oh, it was me all right,” Ida said. “And if you recall, the last thing I said to Norma was ‘Norma, when I’m dead, for God’s sake, do not let Tot Whooten do my hair.’ I even gave her the number of my hairdresser to call, paid the woman for the appointment in advance, and what did Norma do? The first thing she did when I died was to let Tot Whooten do my hair!”

“Oh dear,” thought Elner. At the time, she and Norma had figured Ida would never know about it, but they were clearly wrong.

“Well, Ida,” Elner said, hoping to smooth things over a bit, “I thought it looked very nice.”

“Elner, you know I never parted my hair on the left. And there I was, on view to the world, with my hair parted on the wrong side, not to mention all that rouge she put on me. I looked like a clown in the Shriners’ parade!”

If Elner had entertained any doubts for a second that the woman before her was her sister, she didn’t anymore. It was Ida all right.

“Now, Ida,” she said, “try not to get yourself in a snit. Norma had no choice. Tot is a good friend. How can you tell somebody something like that and not hurt her feelings? She showed up at the funeral home with her supplies and everything. She thought she was doing you a favor. Norma didn’t have the heart to tell her she couldn’t do you.”

Ida was not sympathetic. “I should think a dying wish trumps hurt feelings, any time of the day.”

Elner sighed. “Well, I guess so, but you have to admit, you had a really nice turnout. You had over a hundred people, all your garden club friends came.”

“All the more reason to want to look my best. I should have just gone over to the funeral parlor and handed Neva all my details in person, that’s what I should have done.”

“Well, anyhow, honey, I’m awfully glad to see you again,” said Elner, trying to change the subject.

Ida managed a tight little smile, even though she was still upset over Tot ruining her hairdo. “I’m glad to see you too, Elner.” Then she added, “I notice you’ve put on a few pounds since I saw you last.”

“A few…but that comes with age, I guess.”

“I suppose so. Gerta put on weight when she got older.”

Elner looked around at the white marble hall and said, “Ida, I’m not clear about what’s going on. If you’re not dead, why didn’t you just come on back home?”

“Oh, I am dead. This is my home now,” she said, fingering her pearls.

“Where is this anyway?” asked Elner, looking around again. “And what am I doing here? I’m supposed to be in the hospital, you’ve got me all confused.”

Ida looked at her, with that maddening little know-it-all look of hers. “Well, Elner, if I’m dead, and you can see me, what do you suppose that must mean?”

Now Elner was starting to get upset. “How should I know, Ida? I just fell off a ladder, I’m so addlebrained at this point, I thought I just saw Ginger Rogers go by…and now you’re telling me that you’re dead, when I can see you plain as day. I must have knocked my brain out of whack because none of this is making any sense to me.”

“Think, Elner,” Ida said. “Me? Ginger Rogers?”

Elner thought for a second; then it dawned on her. Ginger Rogers had been dead for years, so had Ida; not only that, she suddenly realized that she could hear every word Ida was saying without her hearing aid! There was definitely something odd and peculiar going on. Then it hit her.

“Wait a minute, Ida,” Elner said. “Don’t tell me I’m dead too?”

“Bingo!”

“I’m dead?”

“You certainly are, my dear, just as dead as you can be.”

“Oh no!…Am I dead and buried?”

“No, not yet, you just died a few minutes ago.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake. You don’t mean it?”

“I do. In fact, you just missed seeing Ernest Koonitz, he just came in yesterday.”

“Ernest Koonitz? The one who used to play the tuba on the Neighbor Dorothy Show?”

“Yes.”

Elner felt a little light-headed. “I need to sit down a minute and think this over.” She went and sat in the red leather chair by the door.

Ida looked concerned all of a sudden and asked, “Are you terribly upset, dear?”

Elner looked at her and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so, I would say surprised more than anything.”

“That’s to be expected, we are all surprised. You know it’s going to happen but somehow you just don’t believe it’s going to happen to you.”

“Oh, I never doubted it would happen,” Elner said. “I just wish that I’d had a little more warning. I just hope I turned off my stove and coffeepot.”

“Yes…well, we all have our regrets, don’t we?” Ida said pointedly.

In a moment, after gaining her composure and coming to terms with what must be true, Elner looked at her sister. “Oh, poor Norma, first you and now me.”

Ida nodded. “Into each life a little rain must fall, as they say.”

“Yes, I guess so, but I hope it won’t hit her too hard, and I am pretty old, so I guess it could not have been too unexpected, could it?”

“No…not like it was when I died, I was just fifty-nine. Now that was entirely unexpected, I was still in very good shape, if I do say so myself.”

Elner sighed. “Now that I’m dead and gone, I just hope Sonny will be all right, Macky said he would take care of him if anything ever happened to me but I don’t think cats miss you much anyway, as long as they get fed.” Elner looked down at her hands and said, “You know, Ida, it’s a funny thing, but I just don’t feel a bit dead, do you?”

“No, not like I thought I would feel. One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead, not much difference. It’s a lot less painful than childbirth, I can tell you that.”

“No, no pain at all. As a matter of fact I feel better than I have for years, my right knee had been giving me some trouble but I didn’t tell Norma, or else she would have jerked me in for a knee replacement, but it feels just fine now,” she said, lifting it up and down. “So what’s going to happen next? Am I going to see everybody else?”

“I don’t know all the details, I was just given the word to meet you and take you inside.”

“That was mighty nice of you, Ida. Seeing a familiar face right off makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Ida agreed. “You’ll never guess who met me when I died.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Herbert Chalkley.”

“Who’s that?”

“Just the past president of the Women’s Club of America, that’s all.”

“Ahh…well that must have been nice for you.”

Ida stood up and opened the top drawer of the desk and began looking for something as she spoke. “By the way, they called me so fast, what was it, a heart attack?”

Elner thought about it, then said, “I’m not sure, I might have gotten stung to death by a bunch of wasps, or maybe just the fall killed me, who knows, and I was hoping to die in my own bed, but you can’t have everything, I guess.”

Ida said, “I’ll bet it was a heart attack. That’s what killed Gerta and Daddy. Of course, my heart was just fine, but then, I was younger than you and your death was sudden…mine wasn’t. The doctor said I had a rare blood disorder, although it had been quite common with the royal families of Germany.”

“Oh Lord,” thought Elner, “Here she goes again, dead twenty-two years and still putting on airs.” She had been at least seventy and died from leukemia, but Ida always had to have something one step up from everybody else. She had been that way her whole life. Their daddy had been nothing but a plain old farmer, but to hear her tell it he had been a baron with personal ties to the Hapsburgs and with ancestral lands deeded to the family. After Ida married Herbert Jenkins, she only got worse. From time to time Elner had been forced to remind her where she had come from, but Elner figured that there was no point to saying anything to her now, not at this late date. If she hadn’t changed by now, she was never going to change.

Ida rattled around in the drawer and finally found the key she was looking for.

“Here it is,” she said. She stood up and went over and began unlocking the big double doors behind her. Finally she got it unlocked, and turned to Elner. “Come on, let’s go.” Elner got up and went over, ready to follow her, but then stopped in her tracks. “Hold on a minute, this is the good place, isn’t it? I’m not headed to the bad place, am I?”

Ida said, “Of course not.”

Elner was relieved to hear it. But then on second thought, she figured if Ida had made it, then everybody must have a pretty good chance. But she still had one more question.

“What’s going to happen when I get inside?”

Ida turned and looked at her like Elner was crazy. “What do you think is going to happen, Elner? You’re going to meet your Maker. That’s where I’m taking you, silly, to meet your Maker.”

“Oh,” said Elner. “And wouldn’t you know it, here I am in this old robe with the pockets falling off and not a stitch of lipstick on.”

“Now you know how I felt,” Ida sniffed.

“Yes…I see what you mean.”

“Are you ready?”

“I guess I am, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

“No, you wouldn’t, and now that you’re here, do you have many regrets?”

“Regrets?”

“Things you wished you had done, before it was too late?”

Elner thought for a second, then said, “Well, I never got to Dollywood…. I would have liked to have done that, but I did get to Disney World, so I guess I can’t complain too much. What about yourself?”

Ida sighed. “I wish I had spent some time in London, visited the palace gardens, maybe had high tea with the royals, but alas, it was not to be.”

And with that Ida threw open the doors with a flourish, stepped back, and said, “TA DA!”