Thursday, September 8, 2011

Christopher Nemelka

I have repeatedly been put into a position in which I must work with, cooperate with or live with someone who I have previous mocked viciously (often times, I assert that the mocking is arguably well-deserved, even after I become BFF’s with the subject of the mockery.)

Example: the year before I went to Houston I remembered hearing a story about a bank that was robbed here in Utah. The story went like this: A woman is alone at the bank. It's one of those drive-through deals with the 80's-sci-fi-movie-pipe-line thing that were still kind of new-ish to Utah at the time. So, she’s alone and the robber drives up to the pipe outside and sends a note into the bank that says “Send all the money through this tube or I’ll blow up the bank, I’ve wired it with explosives,” or something menacing and robber-appropriate to that affect. The poor woman then sends all the money through and of course, there were no explosives in the bank and all the doors could have been locked from her desk and the police could have been there in two minutes etc. It was only just a bad situation, but my friends and I REALLY laughed hard about it for a long time and traded ideas for what we would have done in the bank teller's place.

-Send the manager's card through with fifty cents taped to it.

-Give him a sucker from the kiddie's candy jar.

-lock the doors, call the cops and dance obnoxiously in front of the bullet-proof window.

We got some good laughing mileage out of this story.

Soooo, THEN in spite of being sort of irreverent and prone to unjustly mocking people, I decided to do my best to try and serve God.

I went on my mission and after I had been out for almost a year I was made companions with… THE BANK TELLER! I kid you not.

Inevitably, I felt horrible for making fun of her all that time before we ever knew each other. She’s a really lovely person and definitely one of the most intelligent people I know. I felt especially bad after she told me how utterly stupid she felt ten seconds after the robber drove away. Because, this girl is the exact opposite of stupid. It wasn’t fair for me to be so harsh. No one really knows how they will react in a high-pressure situation. It’s easy to look back and say what you would do. I've never been seriously threatened before. Probably. It's debatable. So maybe I should just shut up, yaknow?

Anway, that’s not really the point. The point is that I repeatedly find myself in sort of bizarre relationships like this.We don't always get to be as close as the bank teller and I did, but I usually walk away with a new found respect, at least.

I don't know if that'll happen with Christopher Nemelka though.

Christopher is a man who I still haven’t met, but who now threatens to spend eternity in my family’s cemetery.

As I insinuated above, this egomaniac (emphasis on maniac) is called Christopher Nemelka. He claims to be a reincarnation of my great-great-great grandfather. He's not. God told me.

Because one of my distant relatives believes him she gave him her cemetery plot so that he could rest with MY family.

This is a picture of me and my sisters standing beside my great-grandma Muzzy’s grave (we’re kind of a morbidly sentimental family) we have lots of pictures like this, not always beside dead people we know. The plot on the other side of me is the one that has been reserved for Christopher Nemelka.

Muzzy probably would have been alright with it, actually. I can just see her sighing, smiling innocently and saying “Oh, that poor man…”

His website's address is carved into the headstone and everything. Which prompted my mother (Oh, how I love her.) to say something along the lines of: "There goes the necropolis."

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