I had the most entertaining call last week. A dear old pal phoned. He was editing some journalism drivel and, no. No need to jump to snarky conclusions. This has nothing to do with your Mighty Signal. The conversation began with him asking if I was feeling OK. Any heart palpitations? Shortness of breath? Had I fallen and couldn’t get up? Most importantly, was I finding myself floating in a tunnel and doing the breast stroke toward a welcoming and kindly ray of unfathomable bright light?
“Feeling ducky,” I responded. “Can still carry a pool table under one arm and a piano under the other and walk up the step to the Santa Clarita Civic Center, all one of them. Why do you ask?”
My pal said he had a press release about College of the Canyons hosting their annual book fair. It had a quote from me that I had provided some time ago. He read it to me. Yup. The usual, Take Two & Go To Right, The Sun Will Come Out, Tomorrow, We Shall Endeavor To Persevere mindless malarkey august community leaders like myself enjoy spewing. He asked me again about my corporal being because the press release referred to me as —
“… the late John Boston.”
I casually glanced at a nearby mirror. Same little puffy bags under my eyes I’ve had since second grade. Killer green bedroom eyes and come-hither smile. I made a thoughtful chimpanzee face, the fourth of the day. My friend asked me if I was lying about my death.
“I’m talking to you right now and you called me,” I pointed out.
“How do I know you’re not AI?”
“Because there’s a good chance if you asked me a question, especially involving math or women’s rights, I’d get it wrong?” I said.
I hope the COC book fair went well. As an author, I sincerely wish people would read more. Well. Let’s be honest. I wish people would just read my books, over and over, and my books alone and curses on them if they free-leased them from the library. I was reminded of that dear, Southern genius, Flannery O’Connor. She said, “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”
Love, love, love that gal.
Premature obituaries are nothing new. Mark Twain read his own in a local paper. In 1897, Twain wrote back, “The report of my death is greatly exaggerated.” Years later, the infamous liberal birdcage liner, The New York Times, penned that Twain had been lost at sea in a yachting accident and presumed dead. He was still alive and not even wet.
Twice, Ernest Hemingway’s death was reported while he was up and about, feeling quite ducky. Actually, the novelist/adventurer was partly to blame. He was in Africa at the time and crashed his plane twice in the same week. Stumbled away both times without a scratch. Hemingway offered a quote about the event:
“… he walked out of the jungle, carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, and was quoted, possibly even correctly, as saying: ‘My luck, she is running very good.’”
Author Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned the famous poem, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In 1816, he was sitting in a coffee shop when he overheard two men discuss how he had just committed suicide by hanging himself. They even showed him the newspaper article.
Reports of England’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s premature demise were even funnier. In 2012, a Canadian government official inadvertently spread the rumor of The Iron Lady’s passing around the globe, announcing, “Thatcher has died.” Turns out “Thatcher” was the name of a friend’s cat.
Circus empresario P.T. Barnum was in ill health. In 1891, he told a newspaper reporter that he wished he could live long enough to read what the obituaries said about him. Serendipity, he actually died on April 7 of that year — my birthday. Well. A few decades later.
Not so long ago, CNN incorrectly reported the deaths of seven world leaders. Pope John Paul II was the recipient of three major news outlet premature obituaries. That’ll be three Our Fathers and a couple of rosaries. Yearly, the Social Security Administration erroneously declares about 500 living souls are dead. And there goes the check and food stamps.
Jon Bon Jovi was somehow confused with the dead artist Ioannis Vasilopoulos and you sure can see how those two names get mixed up. The internet is infamous for spreading calamity, often on purpose, with fake deaths — Jimmy Carter, John Cena, Celine Dion, Bulls’ star Michael Jordan, both Bush presidents, the list swells into the hundreds.
One of my all-time favorite comedy sketches was the Monty Python bit about the Black Plague. There’s a scruffy rogue, slowly walking through a Middle Ages village, followed by a lout pushing a wheelbarrow full of corpses. The rogue keeps ringing a bell and yelling, “BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!!” A bereaved family carts out a skinny relative and tosses him onto the pile of dead bodies. Weakly, the emaciated victim announces, “I’m not dead yet …” He even adds, “I’m feeling better.” Bureaucracy being bureaucracy, with a hammer, they just conk him over the head and continue collecting plague victims.
Honestly? This “late John Boston” nonsense has me worried.
Journalists are famous for taking things quite literally. Like, if were to off-handedly mention, in front of a certain local newspaper’s crack copy desk, that my feet were killing me, I’m confident that next month there’d be published a small boxed story buried in the classified ad section between the categories of “USED CHEMICAL TOILETS, NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY” and “SECOND-HAND GUM.”
The 1-inch obit would solemnly report my demise as —
“Boston’s feet, donning mismatched socks, were in the pokey, awaiting arraignment for first-degree homicide …”
Pick up “Naked Came the Novelist,” Boston’s sequel to the international bestseller, “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” at JohnBoston-Books.com. Lifelong SCV resident John Boston, with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
