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Today's profile is actually chapter 7 in Mickey Dulvont's biography called "There's No Dead Guys In Heaven". Please enjoy.


I used to spending the summer at Grandpa’s house. He wasn’t my real grandpa, but he was older than Pops and had a limp like so many other grandpas. Pops is my mom. Her real name is Penelope. I don’t remember where the name Pops came from but I’ve been calling her that since I was just a kid.

Summer at grandpa’s house was usually spent outside. Chasing frogs, climbing trees, and making mud huts, then decorating them with rugs and fancy lamps, and finding homeless people to occupy them. I guess that’s where my interest in charity work came from. Pops used to always tell me, "you’re a good kid and I sure wish you were mine". I was adopted and Pops used to bring that up a lot. She felt like there must have been some sin she was guilty of that kept her from being able to get pregnant. She used to list off some of the most serious sins she’d committed and ask which one we thought might be keeping her from having a child of her own.

One summer, just about a week before I was going to leave grandpa’s house and go back home, I met a girl named Eleanore Rose Wilder Gosler. I asked her why she had so many names and she asked me why I had so many freckles and I asked her why I’d never seen her before and she asked me if I’d ever seen a real dead person. I paused for a minute because I wondered if she was about to tell me where a dead person was. Then I said, “Really, why do you have so many names?” Funny thing, I don’t even remember what she said, but I do remember it had something to do with a Queen or gardening or something like that. Then, she took me over to the quarry and showed me a dead person.

Then next summer when I went back to Grandpa’s house I asked if he knew anyone named Eleanore Rose Wilder Gosler. And he asked me if I’d ever seen a dead person. I told him about the quarry and that seemed to jar his memory because he then said, “Oh, that Eleanore Rose Wilder Gosler. You bet I know her. She just ran for mayor”. You better believe that came as quite a shock to me because when I had met her the summer before, I had assumed she was about my same age--14 years old. As it turns out, she had a disease that made her look really young. Much younger than her actual age. Turns out, she was 42. I told grandpa about how Eleanore Rose and I had kissed down by the quarry. He told me that he had also done the same. I threw up on my shoes. Not because of what grandpa said, but because of a really gross pickle I had just eaten.

For the rest of the week I tried to find Eleanore Rose, but didn’t have any luck. I later heard she died about that same time, and I never got to see her again.

I’ve never married, see, and that’s because my one true love was Eleanore Rose Wilder Gosler. I believe that when I get to the celestial kingdom, we’ll run into each other. I’ll ask why she had to leave me and she’ll ask me why my knuckles are so nobby. I’ll ask her what the food is like in heaven and she’ll ask me if I want to go see a dead guy. Then we’ll both laugh real loud and long, because there’s no such thing as a dead guy in heaven.