Elmer’s Tune

My cemetery is only five minutes by foot from my house. I’ve been going for walks here, a few times a week, for thirty-five years. I don’t call it mine because I’ll be buried in this place one day. Nor are the graves of my father and step-father, nor any of my grandparents, in this cemetery. It is esoteric knowledge and private rites, not the bare facts of graveyard business, that make it mine.

Long ago, on a hot July day, as I approached the mausoleum, I heard a weird buzzing sound, and looked around to find its source. A cardinal was flying low to the ground, from tree to tree, and it seemed to be making the noise. But it sounded so unreal, like a mechanical insect, that I thought that it couldn’t be the bird. I followed the cardinal with my eyes, the whole time the noise continued, until it passed out of earshot.

But then I heard the noise again: a fast, rattling buzz. This time it was a sparrow, and seeing it drop something from its beak and pick it back up again, I realized it had a cicada caught in its beak. I’d seen one of these bugs dead a few days before and was struck by how large it was. Here was a live one, caught in a bird’s mouth. The thing was buzzing frantically, hysterically, knowing it was about to die. I’d recently begun reading Schopenhauer, poking around rather than systematic study. One of his most famous statements came to me as I watched the sparrow and the cicada. “The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don’t believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

Knowing that the insect was soon to be gnashed down and digested produced in me an uncanny feeling of fear. It was just a bug and a bird, but I was a little shaky, clammy around the neck and chest the way I get when threatened by a vicious dog. Though no lover of insects, I couldn’t help but feel a panicky dread at the knowledge that the bug was about to be swallowed up.

Then another cicada fell to the ground. I heard it buzzing, and walked in that direction. The uncanny fearful feeling rose in trembling waves as I searched but couldn’t find the insect.

A short distance on, I saw the concrete top of a new grave vault. And then nearby, was the open grave, with a half sawhorse laid across it to keep people from stumbling in. I went to the grave, stared down at the cool, clean concrete oblong box that would soon hold a coffin.
Without thinking, without any hesitation, I climbed down inside the coffin vault and lay there staring up at the sky. The clouds moved slowly, and the tree limbs above me were swaying. And I imagined my fleshly remains lying in this kind of place forever. I pictured shovels, in the hands of spectral workers, throwing ghostly dirt down on top of me, and though it called up a mild claustrophobic feel, I didn’t climb out immediately. The concrete was cool, rough, and slightly damp. It was very quiet.

I got out easily (graves aren’t six feet deep, I had discovered, but only about five) and continued on with my walk.

At dusk, I went back to the cemetery. By then, the grave was filled. There was loose dirt neatly covering the hole and two round spots nearby also covered and also scattered with paltry-looking grass seed (nothing will grow there in this summer heat). I read the name on the gravestone:
Elmer Veltz 1906 – 1999.

I stood there a while looking at the grave site, picturing myself twelve hours before lying in the concrete vault. Now, what remained of a 93 year old man was down there. I pictured him small and frail, in a boxy suit too large for him. Stiff and fragile like a doll. Bald, I supposed too, with that vellum-like skin, shiny and translucent. I pictured myself down there twelve hours before, lying peacefully but very aware, paying close attention to what I saw and felt.

It took some digging at the library, but I found Elmer’s obituary. He was “predeceased” (such a clumsy, ugly word) by his wife, and survived by a son and two brothers. He was a retiree from Sibley’s and was a member of the Red Man’s Club. So, it wasn’t just a very old man who had died, but with him vanished memories of the city where I’ve lived my whole life.

Sibley’s had been the biggest and most successful department store in Rochester. Five stories tall, in the heart of downtown, it was the place where you could buy just about anything. I had haunted the record department and brought home a few albums. My grandmother had worked there in the bakery and when she came out for supper on the bus, she always brought a whipped cream cake, neatly boxed and tied up with string, so delicious I can still taste it more than half a century later. The Sibley’s building remains, but the days of the great department stores are long behind us now.

Likewise, the Red Man’s Club, which boomed in the golden age of fraternal organizations, but which shrunk to nearly nothing by the time Elmer died. They claimed direct lineage to the fake Indians at the Boston Tea Party, and though they used various bogus Indian terms for their rituals and organization, they were until 1974 an overtly whites-only organization. All I recall of the Red Men in Rochester is their bowling alley, which like Sibley’s is no more.

I decided to take on Elmer’s grave as a kind of spiritual practice, making sure the grass was clipped and the flowers watered. It seemed absurd – I never knew the man – and kind of pathetic too, as though rehearsing for my own death, and the long sleep that will follow. But I’d occupied, if only for a short while, the same space where his coffin had been laid. I’d looked up at the sky from the bottom of his neatly-dug hole in the earth, and saw what no one – not even Elmer – had ever seen.

A melody kept floating into my inner ear. It took a while to realize it was “Elmer’s Tune,” which had been popular years before I was born. Doing some musical excavation, I found out that Elmer Albrecht originally composed this catchy bit of saccharine fluff in the early 1920s. At the time, he was a student at the Worsham College of Embalming in Chicago and worked at Louis Cohen’s funeral parlor on Clark Street. According to Albrecht, he originally worked out the melody and chords on a piano in a back room of the funeral parlor which at the time held the corpses of twelve men hacked to death with axes in Chicago’s Tong Wars.

Over the years, Albrecht, who worked days as an embalmer, played the tune in honky-tonks and seedy night clubs around Chicago. In February 1941, he approached Dick Jurgens, whose band was playing at a ballroom nearby the funeral parlor where Albrecht worked. He was allowed to play around on one of the pianos at the ballroom during his lunch break. Pestered by Albrecht, Jurgens agreed to arrange Albrecht’s tune for his band. They cut the tune – still without a title – as an instrumental and at the last minute settled on “Elmer’s Tune.” Glenn Miller had words written to fit the title (with “love” rhyming with “above” and “Elmer’s tune” being crooned by “the man in the moon”) and took it to number one on the charts, with the Modernaires laying on sickly sweet harmonies.

Hardly the usual music for a funeral, but given its origin, and my link to Elmer Veltz, it has become for me a cheery, up-tempo
dirge.

Since then, over the decades I’ve lived in this place, I’ve walked by the grave dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. Often, I go right by without even a glance at his stone. But there are times when my thoughts go back to that day in July when I occupied a stranger’s grave. And on even more rare occasions, I’ll stop and sing a few bars of “Elmer’s Tune.”

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