name in the window

sometimes you grow up with something and it never crosses your mind that others might think it is weird and then when that happens it makes you stop and think.................

i grew up in a small town, population about 2,000 and we were basically the blinking light intersection in the highway between two larger cities.  it is basically a bedroom community where generations of families have lived and you know almost everyone in town.  my childhood was one of being raised by a village, i was on my own a lot, original latch-key kid, but all my nosey neighbors were watching!

i now live in a larger city, at one end of that highway that goes through my small town, they now have 2 traffic signals!  the other day i decided to go to the mall with a friend of mine but took a large detour to my hometown to run a couple of errands.  we drove down the "main drag" past the local methodist church and there were cars parked every where.  we were trying to decide what was going on, hoping for a local bake sale with homemade goodies when she noticed a lot of people were wearing black and thought it might be a funeral.  i said we would be driving past the funeral home so we could see who's name was in the window.

what?  we can see who's name is in the window?  they put names in the window?  yeah, that's how you know who died and when the funeral is.  right then we got to the funeral home, look, in the window, there is his name and it mentions the methodist church, it is his funeral today.

my friend couldnt believe it.  to me it was a way to pass the word in my small town so you know who to pay your respects to and maybe if you want to duck in and sign the guest book or attend the visitation.  we were lucky to have a local paper but it only comes out once a week, if you waited to find out who died by reading the paper you could miss the service.  makes complete sense to me, never occured to me that it would not make sense to someone else.