Uncle Morty: Conversations from the Other Side

Tales from the Other Side
With Uncle Morty
 


Some of you have been asking about your Uncle Morty’s condition.  How? You ask.  Why?
 
No offense, but the flesh-covered are dense, stuck in the material world like flies buried in Jello. I’m not sure I can really explain my condition to you.  As to how? It’s complicated, technical and a little boring when you get right down to it.  Why?Let’s just say I might have crossed a few metaphysical boundaries here and there while I was embodied.  I might have broken a teensy rule or two on the other side too. Anyhoo…my bad luck is your learning experience.  I’ve decided to publish a few tidbits of conversations from the other side.
 
Here begins Morty’s transcription of messages from beyond.

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​On old age and dying – Francine; disembodied, age 89 
             
“I always thought getting older would be like building a mountain, a mountain of experience and wisdom.  By the time you’re eighty, there you’d be at the top, perched like a white-robed guru.  Younger generations would ascend the stones of your life to hear your words. The right way to feed babies, to handle a difficult husband, to work, sew, get up and feed the calves in the morning, gather the eggs, still get your pack of rascals on the school bus. Until I was in my forties, I honestly believed there was something solid ahead.  Some perch from which reality would seem reasonable and I would know the answers.
            
The joke was on me.  Reality shifted.  Not one amongst that lot makes bread, or gathers eggs, none of ‘em would know how to butcher a chicken if their life depended on it.  Seems like the babies are a whole new species the way they cater to them now.  If you don’t like a husband…leave him.  Instead of teaching them, I sometimes envied them.  They taught me how to email and fiddle with the TV remote.  I realized there was no path. No mountain.
         
Instead of building a mountain, I pieced a quilt. No pattern.  A crazy quilt.  And it may not win a prize or fetch $500 like granny’s old wedding ring quilt did when Anne sold it to go back to school after she left Danny, but it was pretty. I have to say it. There was my husband Frank’s old pajama shirt, there was Anne’s Easter dress I made out of that cheap blue calico.  That patch on the corner was a piece of the gown Granny wore at the hospital the day before she died.  All in all, it wasn’t bad, that quilt. In my old age, I laid myself down on it and touched this bit of flannel, that bit of calico, the linen from the suit that June wanted for graduation.
            
The babies crawled around the corners of it on the one end and the dead tugged, tugged, tugged at it from the other.   

The teenagers, the adults? Those rascals couldn’t care less what you know or what wisdom you have to impart. If you’re lucky they’ll occasionally ask you now and then if you’re comfortable, there on your old quilt. Any rate, you’ve come to realize it doesn’t matter much anyway.  Reality is wearing thin.  Let them learn their lessons same way you learned yours.  Let them piece their own quilts.

Eventually, babies yanking on it from one end, the dead from the other, one day you know for sure there’s nothing under that old quilt but air.  And you know which set will win the tug of war. The voice of your dead mother sounds closer in your ear than the babies laughing.  

Granny finally says, “Time to get on over here.  Wrap that quilt around you and come on.  It’s a cold walk over, but we’ve got a place for you at the table and we’re tired of waiting dinner.”

​Mortimer Richard Wolcott is, quite frankly, not very forthcoming with his bio. We're not even sure if that's his real name. His work during his embodiments is not something he'll willingly share.  However, his deathography is somewhat clear, at least from the time he showed up at Sacred Chickens Farm for a Halloween Party and never left.  He is occasionally pressed into service to help write the blog and you can search the archives here for his wisdom.  

He enjoys hanging out with cats, the occasional cocktail, and dispensing sarcastic remarks to the living.

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