The Salesmen at the Kitchen Table

Two salesmen came to our kitchen table when I was young.

One sold my parents knowledge.

The other sold them death.

That sounds too dramatic, maybe, but that is how it arranges itself in memory now. Both visits happened early, sometime between 1980 and 1985. Both men sat at the same kitchen table where we ate supper, sorted mail, did homework, played cards, and conducted the small business of family life. Both were persuasive. Both left with my parents having agreed to pay for something large, abstract, and not immediately necessary.

The first, I think, was the crypt salesman.

He was older, in a suit and tie, serious in the way men become serious when they are selling the future as a responsibility. He came from the Mausoleum of the Good Shepherd, door to door, to talk to my parents about buying a crypt for their eventual deaths.

Their eventual deaths.

To a child, this was nearly impossible to understand.

Death belonged to old people, distant people, people in stories, not my parents sitting alive at the kitchen table. They were still young. My mother was in her thirties. My father was younger than I am now. They had kids, jobs, a farmette, animals, gardens, bills, projects, and no visible reason to be discussing marble and burial.

I remember them saying, or at least later understanding that they felt, it seemed too early.

But the salesman was convincing.

That was part of the lesson.

A person did not have to force you into anything. He only had to arrive, sit down at your table, open a folder, speak with confidence, and make the thing he was selling feel like the responsible thing to do.

Just showing up did half the work.

So my parents bought the crypt.

They would pay monthly for a thing that seemed a lifetime away.

As a child, I filed this away as one of the many strange adult decisions I did not understand. Why would you buy a place for your body to go when you were still busy living? Why would anyone want to talk about this over coffee? Why would a man come to your house and sell death like siding or insurance?

But adulthood has changed the memory.

Because now I see their forethought.

They were not morbid.

They were trying to spare us something.

They were doing what responsible people of their generation did: making payments toward a future no one wanted but everyone knew would come. It was planning, not despair.

Only the timing turned cruel.

They had bought something meant for old age.

My mother needed it at forty-six.

I wonder about that sometimes—the shock of a monthly payment becoming suddenly relevant. The crypt no longer an abstraction. The salesman’s brochure no longer distant. The future arriving decades early, wearing my mother’s name.

She was interred there in 1993.

My father joined her twenty-two years later.

For all that is painful in this memory, I have to admit something: seeing their names together now on that marble face plaque is a good memory.

Cream-colored stone.

The surname at the top:

KRUMPOS.

Then:

KEITH · 1950 — 2015 BETTY · 1947 — 1993

The dates do their own work.

She was born three years before him.

She died twenty-two years before he did.

She waited there for him, if one can say such things.

And now they are together again.

There are often flowers at the base, which means someone has been visiting. That matters to me. A mausoleum can seem cold in the abstract, but the flowers soften it. They make the marble less final, more tended.

I may have seen the crypt before my mother died, because others in the family had been interred there before—grandparents, a stillborn cousin, probably more. But I do not remember it clearly from before. I remember it after.

I remember seeing it with only my mother’s name.

Then, years later, with both of their names.

Helen was there when my mother was interred.

Helen was there when my father was.

I think those may be the only two times we were both there together.

That detail feels almost unbearably precise.

Two siblings, together at the beginning and end of the same long absence.

Recently I brought my six-year-old son there.

That, too, changed the place.

To show a child the names of the grandparents he cannot fully know is to feel time folding. I was once the child overhearing death at a kitchen table. Now I am the father standing before marble, translating family into words simple enough for a boy.

The second salesman was younger.

College-aged, maybe. Shirt and tie. Southern accent.

He sold Encyclopedia Britannica.

I do not know how my parents were persuaded into buying the set. “Suckered” is the word that comes to mind, though that may be unfair. It was a common enough purchase then, and for families who valued education, encyclopedias carried real weight. They were not decorative. They were aspiration bound in leatherette.

Still, I remember my parents looking at each other after the sale and wondering whether the company intentionally sent people from different parts of the country to stir sympathy in the buyer. A young man with a southern accent, far from home, earnest at the table—maybe that was strategy. Maybe it worked.

That was another lesson.

Sales was not only facts and prices.

Sales was atmosphere.

A stranger enters the house and becomes human in front of you. You do not buy only the product. You buy relief from the discomfort of saying no. You buy the story he makes around himself. You buy the version of yourself who is generous, responsible, educated, prepared.

I learned some of that sitting nearby.

Not because anyone explained it.

Because I watched my parents weigh things.

The encyclopedias arrived and became part of the house.

Huge volumes, lined up, authoritative, almost ceremonial. They had that thin encyclopedia paper and formal smell, the feeling of information made heavy. Helen and I read from them endlessly, not only for school but for entertainment. We would pull a volume down and wander through entries the way other children might channel surf.

The world was alphabetized in those books.

Animals, countries, inventions, wars, planets, kings, weather systems, painters, diseases, machines. You could begin with one thing and drift into another, following curiosity before hyperlinks existed. The encyclopedia was a physical internet with gold edges and adult seriousness.

Whatever hesitation my parents had about the salesman, the books earned their place.

They were useful for years.

More than useful.

They enlarged the house.

That is what the two purchases have in common, strange as it sounds.

One enlarged our knowledge.

One prepared a place for our dead.

Both were bought too early, in a sense.

The encyclopedias before we knew how much we would use them.

The crypt before we knew how soon we would need it.

Both were adult attempts to prepare for what children cannot yet imagine.

A future with questions.

A future with graves.

And both were placed, first, on the kitchen table.

That table keeps returning in these memories. It was where practical life and enormous life met. Bills, homework, coffee, casseroles, family talks, school papers, sales pitches, death arrangements. The kitchen table was the family’s little parliament, its altar of decision. A salesman could sit there and change the shape of the future.

I think now about my parents in those years.

They were not rich.

They were still building everything by hand. The farmette, the gardens, the house repairs, our childhood. Money mattered. Monthly payments mattered. An encyclopedia set and a mausoleum crypt were not nothing.

And yet they said yes.

Maybe too easily.

Maybe wisely.

Maybe both.

That is one of adulthood’s harder lessons: foolishness and foresight can wear the same clothes.

The encyclopedia salesman may have played them a little, but Helen and I received a library.

The crypt salesman may have arrived absurdly early, but my parents spared us a decision during the worst years of our lives.

Both things can be true.

And maybe that is why this memory matters to me. As a child, I saw salesmen. As an adult, I see my parents trying to provide for futures they could only partly understand.

A future where their children needed facts.

A future where their children needed a place to stand with flowers.

The Britannica volumes must be gone now, or scattered, or outdated in the way all printed knowledge eventually becomes outdated. But I can still feel the weight of one in my lap.

The mausoleum plaque remains.

Cream stone.

Their names.

Their dates.

Flowers below.

One salesman sold us a world of information.

The other sold us a small square of permanence.

And years later, both purchases seem less strange to me than they once did.

They were my parents doing what they always did:

trying, with limited money and imperfect information, to take care of us beyond the present moment.