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If you live in Fjord, Wisconsin, or you regularly read this column, you may be acquainted with Fjord residents Celeste Teale and her husband David C. Fischer. You may have heard the story they tell when someone asks how they met. They met in a funeral parlor, in a visitation line. Fischer usually lets Celeste tell the story first (she is direct and efficient), but then Celeste, most times, suggests that Fischer give his version, too, which begins,
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There I was, just arrived in the funeral line, and, after a moment, I realized the long-haired, skinny-assed woman ahead of me looked familiar. So I touched her elbow and tentatively said, “I ... should ... know you.”
The woman turned, looked me in the eye, and told me for sure, “No. You shouldn’t!”
This was late in the year, in 2012, the last Wednesday of November, and the woman definitely looked familiar, so I was thinking maybe I’d seen her somewhere not long before, and I made a guess, “Maybe I saw you at the Veterans Day thing at the elementary school?”
“No,” she said. “I am a veteran, I was in the Army, but I don’t go to the Veterans Day ‘thing.’”
So I tried another thought. “Maybe Memorial Day? Would I have seen you at that?”
But she said again, “No. I have lived here ten years, and I do happen to live next to the cemetery, but my husband was sick until he died this past June, and we didn’t go to the Memorial Day events, either.”
So we set it aside, if we’d met, where we’d met, and talked about other things. It was a long line, a slow-moving line, and, by the time we got a chance to pay our respects to the family of the man whose visitation it was, we had covered a lot of ground, places we’d lived (other than Fjord), schools we’d gone to, the late husband’s illness, the correct spelling of our respective surnames, a lot of ground.
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It was not until some weeks later that Teale and Fischer figured out just why one of them looked familiar and the other did not. Sometimes, having heard the How We Met story twice, people do ask, “Well, then, how’d you meet the first time?”
The answer to that question is a shorter tale. Or at least it is when told by Teale.
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