"The Love of My Life is Buried in the Wamego Cemetery."

I'm dead. Somewhere in the eight hour shift I worked today, I went from being the bubbly cashier that double bags groceries when asked to being the slumped over checker who reads tabloids between lanes and hardly smiles at the customers. Usually I'm not like this; I guess it was just a harder day at work than I expected. I had one old man that was infuriated with me because I didn't give him a five dollar bill at the moment that he wanted it.

But, I also talked to a guy who recently went to Belize and a funny woman who told me that she got thrown in jail in Colorado for touching another woman's shoulder. I wasn't sure if to believe her or not.



In other news, my mom and my sisters had an interesting run-in at a grad party today. At Amelia's party, they sat down next to this older couple. The old woman--who was hard at hearing--kept shouting at Rachel, wanting to know where she was going for college. When she told them that she was going to Iowa, the old man exclaimed, "Oh, I'm from there!" He then proceeded to carry on a conversation with my mom and with Amelia's dad about how the wheat crop in Iowa isn't so great this year due to various agricultural problems that my family didn't pick up on. Anyway, Mom let it slip that she was originally from Kansas, and the old lady also exclaimed, "I'm from there!"

Mom eventually found out that the lady was from Manhattan, KS, which is approximately thirty minutes away from her hometown of Wamego.

"I'm from Wamego," Mom said loudly, "Do you know where that is?"

The old woman stared for a moment before nodding. Mom wanted to ask her some of the usual "Wamego Bingo" (hey, we're not Dutch, okay?) questions but the old lady didn't seem receptive to them. She ended up asking:

"So, how long have you two been together?"

The old man replied, "Oh, we aren't married. But we have been together for longer than most couples."

The old woman looked away from the table. "I never married. The love of my life is buried in the Wamego cemetery."

She actually said that line. I wanted to kick myself--or maybe my manager--for making me work today when such an amazing story took place before my mom's eyes.

The story of her fiance's death slowly unfolded throughout the course of the night. It seems that the woman's fiance was poisoned by his mother. It was supposedly an accident: the mother left a nicotine inhaler next to the man's actual inhaler, and when the man had an asthma attack, the mother grabbed the wrong inhaler. She gave her son a shot of the nicotine and the young boy died within thirty seconds.

So, this woman's fiance died physically and took his fiancee's life with him in some ways. She hasn't gotten over his death, even after 80-some years. She has this man who follows her around--a life companion of sorts--but she will never marry him because her heart belongs to some guy who's been dead since the 1940s. Wow.

My mom called my grandmother to check up on these facts and found them to be true. The boy was named Tom S., and my grandfather may have been friends with him when they were younger.

A novelist couldn't have thought of a better tale.

I wish I'd been there to experience the story firsthand.