Anubis Drives a Tan Suzuki Week 2

Updates:

Sunday: I created a Facebook group to keep everyone updated on the project. If you’re not a member of the group, join. It’s open to everyone.

I e-mailed my boss at Dvorak Funeral Home in Pasco, WA and she put a link on her website which you can check out here: http://www.dvorakfuneralhome.com/

I also had a lot of my friends share the link I posted on my page. Thank you to all of them for their support of this project.

Tuesday: I got a lot of good Ideas for my project from my friend Janine, who knows a lot more about blogging than I do. Thank you, Janine.

Thursday: My boss, Heather Dvorak at Dvorak Funeral home, informed me that she had contacted Kenneth Howe at Holman Howe Funeral Home in Lebanon, MO and he agreed to let his establishment be a host funeral home for this project.

Friday: Spoke to Kenneth Howe and confirmed his willingness to participate in this project. I also learned that in 2012 he was selected as the Funeral Director of the Year by American Funeral Director Magazine.

I also E-mailed all of the funeral director’s associations that currently have working e-mail addresses (48 total). So far I’ve only heard back from one, but considering that it’s the weekend, even one is more than I expected.

So, as you can see, it has been a pretty exciting week. I’m still overwhelmed with the outpouring of support I’ve gotten from everyone. Even the fact that I already have a funeral home that has agreed to host is a bit hard to comprehend. I just hope I can keep up this level of momentum moving forward.

Questions and Concerns Addressed:

In this section I will attempt to address the very reasonable questions and concerns brought up by the people after reading my last post.

The first one was why I felt it was important to mention that I will make sure to portray each funeral home in a positive light. I felt it was important to reassure any potential host funeral home managers and owners that I will not be coming there to write any sort of lurid exposé of their funeral home. Doing so would be shooting myself in the foot, especially since I will be posting my profiles and interviews weekly. If I were to post something negative about a funeral home in, for example, California that the owner of the North Dakota funeral home didn’t like and they decided to pull out of the project then I would have to scramble to find another funeral home in North Dakota to profile after I’m already underway. I’ve also taken several business law classes over the course of my academic career and I am well aware of the concept of libel. The last thing that I want to do is spend the rest of my life paying for a small gaffe written during what was supposed to be the last great adventure of my young life.

The next question I keep getting is: why not film it? And/or: Why not contact some of the major cable networks and pitch it as a show? So far, my proclamations that I’m too ugly or not photogenic enough for TV have fallen on deaf ears and/or been met with cries of “What about Honey Boo-Boo?” to which, I have no argument. My concern with filming my adventure was that this might make for too much work for me on top of everything else during and at the end of the project, but like my good friend Brandon Goode pointed out: I will not be able to go back and film it afterward. So on these two points, I have bowed to the pressure put on me by the majority. I will try to budget for one, maybe two dashboard cams and perhaps a hand held camera with a stand for interviews. I will also contact the major networks, but only after I’ve got a few more funeral homes signed on to this project. I feel there is no point in trying to pitch such a concept until I’m reasonably certain that it will actually happen.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that I might need to narrow my focus. The main Ideas so far are: 1. Exploring regional cultural and religious diversity through the lens of funeral service, 2. How each funeral home is adapting and has adapted historically to changes in cultural and religious diversity locally, and 3. What each staff member of the funeral homes I visit has learned through their experiences in the funeral industry about the cultural and religious diversity of the areas where they live and work.

Full disclosure: these are all things that have interested me and things that I have become more eager to learn about through my own experiences in the funeral industry in Washington State (where I currently live) and Oregon and I am very interested to learn more about how things are in different parts of the country, but I’ll be the first to admit that this whole idea grew out of my desire to drive across the country spending more than just a few hours in each state, which, is what I’d probably end up doing if I just saved up the gas money and just went without any other goal than to just say that I did it. I knew that in order to actually fully appreciate and experience this beautiful country of ours I needed to have more than just the occasional conversations with bored gas station attendants.  Increased time spent in each state requires increased funding for the trip.  In this brave new world of crowd-funding, all that is needed for funding is an idea that will get people interested and excited, which, somehow, someway, I seem to have stumbled upon through a combination of my background and personal interest. This is all a shock to me in the extreme considering that I have always seemed to be the oddball in whatever group of people I’ve been placed in or associated with throughout my live, even in the Funeral Service program at Mount Hood I was considered a bit of an oddball.

The Title:

Another thing I forgot to cover last week was where I came up with the name for this project, Anubis Drives a Tan Suzuki.

First off, it did not occur to me that when you lump the title together as all one word, as you must do in these situations, that you could conceivably read it as: Anubis Drive Satan Suzuki. This was not at all my intention. To paraphrase a common saying during the McCarthy era: I am not now, nor have I ever been associated with any favorable outlook on Satan. No one has mentioned the possible misreading yet, but I figured I’d try and get ahead of the curve.

Anubis, as many of you might know, was the Egyptian God most associated with embalming. This might be a bit of a stretch as it refers to me because, and don’t laugh, I’m still not entirely confident enough in my own abilities to be left alone to embalm on my own. If left with a body and a deadline, I’m sure I’d just nut-up and do it, but given the fact that I’m not yet fully licensed, that would probably not be a good idea from a legal standpoint. Luckily, no one as yet has put me into that position.

The “Drives a Tan Suzuki” part is self-explanatory.

Let’s get Autobiographical:

I know I promised that I would share a bit of my background this week, but too much happened and too much was left unexplained last week that I felt my time writing and your time reading was better spent with me updating and clarifying.

However, I do feel that I at least owe my audience the story of how I named my car, The H. F. S. Laura, since she will be a crucial part of the story until practicality and the Pacific Ocean demand that I leave her behind. The H. F. S. part is a recent addition. It stands for His Four-door Sedan. The “Laura” part is a much more interesting and slightly more embarrassing story, but it is a story that must be told for the sake of honesty and transparency.

As you might have guessed by now, she was named after a woman, a one-that-got-away. I know the phrase is usually “THE one that got away,” but with someone like me who has such cowardice and such a short attention span when it comes to women, there are often many ones-that-got-away.

Back in 2005/ 2006 I was 22/23 and worked at a gas station/convenience store at the south end of West Richland, WA. About once a month or so this 6 foot plus blond Goddess with a smile that could melt the polar icecaps and doom us all, would come in and buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Before I ever worked up the courage to ask her her name or gathered up enough wits when she was there to simply look at her debit card for her name, I just longingly referred to her as The Ben & Jerry’s Girl.

I worked at this gas station for a year and never worked up the courage to ask her out. By the time I put in my two weeks’ notice so I could get a better job, I hoped against hope that she would come in one last time, but she never did.

A year or so later some friends of mine and I decided on a spur-of-the-moment trip to the coast, about 6 or 7 hours away. Because it was probably a good idea to have money for gas on this adventure, I stopped by the Albertsons grocery store where I worked to pick up my latest paycheck.

As soon as I walked into the main part of the store, there she was. She was just as beautiful as she was when I first saw her, as she always was, and probably always will be, but much to my horror she was with one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. I’m not gay in the least, but I can spot when and to what extent I’m out-matched by a member of my own gender. And boy was I ever out-matched. He was one of those guys who exude charm and personality from every pour, leaving a trail of envious men and lustful women in his wake.

I was, in a word, devastated. If she could get a man like that, how could I ever hope to compare or compete? All was lost.

At that point I had had my Aerio for about a year and I still hadn’t settled on a name yet. In my pain and my sorrow, I named her Laura to remind me to never miss an opportunity again, to always take life by the horns and wrestle it and all of its cruelty to the ground.

So far it hasn’t worked. I forget all the time to do all of those very inspirational and cliché things I just mentioned and I’m still a coward when it comes to the fairer sex, for the most part. Oh, well.

I still feel sorry for my friends who were with me that night and had to listen to me whine and moan all the way to and from Ocean Shores. I hope they forgive me.

Postscript: Laura and I are now part of the same social circle. She and most of my friends don’t know this story (until now, at least). And I’m now good friends with Don, the über handsome guy she was with that fateful night. In addition to living up to my initial impression, he’s also very smart, a great conversationalist and an excellent cook. Hands off ladies, he’s taken. Not by Laura, but someone equally as lovely.

With the passing of time I’ve realized how silly I had been that night, for reasons that are obvious and for others I will not get into, but I’ve been told that it is bad luck to rename a vessel. So, my tan 2006 Suzuki Aerio will remain Laura for as long as I own her.

Like last time, if you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, spelling or grammatical corrections (how will I ever learn if no one ever says anything), words of support or encouragement, confessions of love, hate-filled rantings of utter distain, or anything else for me, do not hesitate to email me at funhomeambo@gmail.com.

I’ll post a new one of these every week. Feel free to e-mail me and call me a loser if I don’t live up to my self-imposed deadline.

After this week, I’m going to leave next week’s topic up in the air. Hopefully I’ll have more updates, but if not then much more Bio.

Here are links to my funeral home’s website: http://www.dvorakfuneralhome.com/

And to the Holman Howe Funeral Homes, my first confirmed host: http://www.holmanhowe.com/

Hope you enjoyed it and I thank you for reading all of this or skipping to the end, whichever is the case.

Johnathan Hove