About 16 years ago, after moving from Los Angeles to Missouri to be near our families, my husband worked for a short time as a funeral director, helping his father at the family's mortuary.
One day, the mortuary received a call that the family of an elderly woman who had passed away in Nashville wanted to bury her in Joplin. A funeral home in Nashville would take care of preparing the body (yes, that means embalming it). It was about the same cost to fly the body to Joplin as it would be to drive there and pick her up, and since I used to live in Nashville, my father in law gave us the chance to go spend a day or so there, then drive the woman back to Joplin for a service and burial. Which we did. No problems.
Until there was a problem.
We were on our way back from Nashville, driving the mortuary's Suburban with the woman in the back, covered with a sheet and a cot cover (think fuzzy blanket). We were near Poplar Bluff, and as chief navigator, I mayyyyyybe wasn’t entirely paying attention to road signs (there's a tricky turn there, if you aren't paying attention AND are eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts) and took us a little off our course, into the hills and hollers of south central Missouri (remember Deliverance?).
As soon as I realized we were headed in the wrong direction, I had my husband turn and head west at the first possible paved road. We didn’t have a map, because we didn’t NEED a stinkin’ map (so says I, having made that trip DOZENS of times over the years). We were in the middle of NOWHERE (do you hear the banjo playing?), on a county road that wound through the Mark Twain National Forest, when we rounded a curve and came upon a road block, set up by a highway patrolman.
My husband pulled to a stop and rolled down the window, and the patrolman approached our car. "Uhh, are you looking for someone?" my husband asked, thinking a bank robber or maybe an ax murderer was on the lam in the area. "No," said the patrolman, as pleasant as can be. "Just a routine registration and proof of insurance check." Now, even though we were doing nothing wrong, my husband immediately started sweating. He began rummaging through the glove compartment, looking for the registration and proof of insurance. I kept eating doughnuts. Did I mention that it's state law to have your registration and proof of insurance inside the vehicle? Because it is. My husband, his forehead glistening with sweat as he dug through the paperwork in the glove compartment, kept repeating, “I’m a licensed funeral director and this is my dad’s car” over and over and over. The more he looked for it, the more he sweat, because he couldn’t find the paperwork anywhere. The patrolman patiently waited, making small talk about the weather. Finally, I leaned over my sweating husband and said to the patrolman, "My husband missed a turn, and we're a little lost. Can you tell us how to get back on Highway 60?" Exclaiming that we were, indeed, really lost, given where we had ended up and where we meant to be, he gave us directions and sent us on our way, telling us to have a good day.
And apparently forgot that he never saw our registration and proof of insurance – whew! (although I found it not long after we pulled away while trying to put all the papers BACK in the glove compartment).
And we never had to explain why we had a dead body in the back of the Suburban, on a cot with a blanket over her, because he never noticed it – double whew!
"Uhh, are you looking for someone?" my husband asked, thinking a bank robber or maybe an ax murderer was on the lam in the area.
"No," said the patrolman, as pleasant as can be. "Just a routine registration and proof of insurance check."
Now, even though we were doing nothing wrong, my husband immediately started sweating. He began rummaging through the glove compartment, looking for the registration and proof of insurance. I kept eating doughnuts.
Did I mention that it's state law to have your registration and proof of insurance inside the vehicle? Because it is.
My husband, his forehead glistening with sweat as he dug through the paperwork in the glove compartment, kept repeating, “I’m a licensed funeral director and this is my dad’s car” over and over and over. The more he looked for it, the more he sweat, because he couldn’t find the paperwork anywhere. The patrolman patiently waited, making small talk about the weather.
Finally, I leaned over my sweating husband and said to the patrolman, "My husband missed a turn, and we're a little lost. Can you tell us how to get back on Highway 60?"
Exclaiming that we were, indeed, really lost, given where we had ended up and where we meant to be, he gave us directions and sent us on our way, telling us to have a good day.