Mitch Albom (2003) the five people you meet in Heaven

I read this book in two sittings. It didn’t take me long. For those of you that don’t know Mitch Albom is ‘Author of the international bestseller tuesdays with Morrie’. For those of you that did know, but forgot, it’s tagged below the author’s name on the cover. I’ve read tuesdays with Morrie and I can probably tell you the plot, Mitch Albom goes to visit this old guy called Morrie on a Tuesday, and then one of them dies and it’s not Mitch and it’s not Tuesday. I read quite a lot and my memory is terrible, books swirl around like corks in an empty ocean,some of them stick, but most of them don’t. I remember I liked tuesday with Morrie and I’m sure it had some home-spun wisdom.

I’m sure Morrie went to heaven and I’m sure Eddie, who is over eighty-years', is the same kind of ageless hero that went to heaven, because the narrator tell the reader the end is the beginning.

The last hours of Eddie’s life was spent like most of the others at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by a gray ocean. The park had the usual attractions, a board-walk, a Ferris wheel, roller coasters, bumper cars, a taffy stand, and an arcade where you could shoot streams of water into a clown’s mouth.

I was trying to remember where I’d read this kind of stuff before. When I was a kid we used to get two Sunday papers. The Sunday Mail and The Sunday Post. The Post had 'The Broons' and 'Oor Wullie' and  carried pages of homilies to the salt-of-the-earth everyman and everywoman that went that extra step to make life better for everybody else. People a bit like Eddie. Eddie dies saving a little girl’s life, but he’d lived a full life and now he’s on the other side there’s some lessons he’s got to learn before he progresses to Heaven mark II. When salt of the earth meets sugar something has to give.

Eddie meets the guy with blue skin, who worked in the carnival as a freak. He meets his wife and his dad and Ruby who the pier was named after. Each one tries to decrust his salty exterior to get to that mushy heart within. Eddie asks big questions like is God in heaven? Yeh, Eddie, he really is. And can he talk to Him? Yeh, Eddie, you can. We all can!

I guess the character that sticks with me is the Captain. He’s waiting for Eddie on top of a tree in some unnamed island in the Pacific. Eddie has joined up. Of course he did. Anybody worth their salt joined up (President Trump got five deferrals from the Vietnam war because his dad was rich, rich, rich, rich and very rich) and Eddie is no exception to the non-rich, salt-of-the -earth rule. The Captain is one of the good guys but he shoots Eddie, because it was necessary. That’s what good guy do. They do the necessary and salt of the earth that they are, don’t try and claim the credit (compare with the marauding band of Trumpters). Eddie was mad about it. Of course he was, but he had a lesson to learn, don’t be a Donald all your life. Let it go.

The surprise here is Eddie, the Captain, and a few of his good buddies, get captured by the sneaky Japanese. You know the kind. They look like North Koreans, crudely written caricatures of real people, easily fooled, and fond wanting in the end. Eddie has to kill a couple of Nips. Listen up, salt of the earth wasn’t brought into this world to bow to the masochistic, no good bastards that like torturing poor soldiers and aren’t even American Trumpters. Eddie does what a man’s got to do. So does the Captain. In a heavenly body he understands better the choices he had to make. There’s a line rattling about somewhere about everybody affecting everybody else, even those not yet born.  I want one of those heavenly bodies, but not right now Mr –Apocalypse Now- Trump for Dummies. Not now.

So tueday with Morrie. Yeh, I’d like a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday too, if you don’t mind. Thanks Mitch for reminding us. There’s sugar and sugar puffs. Salt of the earth. You better believe it – or else.