Tag Archives: Funerals

Reading, Uncategorized, Writing

Early spring ruminations

Leave a comment
Photo credit: nyegi. Unsplash license

We’re at the dirty end of spring right now. It was cold for a couple days, but we got up near 50 (Fahrenheit) today, and the whole week is supposed to be mild. (Thank Providence, I defrosted my freezer last week.) Most of the snow is gone now; just some crusty edges left – which doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow. We probably will. But that will be short-lived. The ground made visible now is unlovely – dead grass and black dirt. A monochrome, frostbit world.

This week is for me a wild social whirl, which means I had/have two things going on. Or three, if you call a doctor’s visit a social event. That was Monday. I had to see my clinic’s Diabetic Educator. As it says somewhere in Job, “The thing I have greatly feared has come upon me.” (Norman Vincent Peale quotes that repeatedly in his Positive Thinking books.) It actually wasn’t as bad as I feared. The nice lady didn’t put me on a diet. I’ve got some documents I need to get around to reading, but what I took away was mostly that I needed to consume fewer carbs and more fiber. Fiber, apparently, can buffer the carbs in your digestive system, reducing insulin spikes. Good to know.

(Note: I don’t have full-blown diabetes. But I am On the Road. Enough to make lifestyle changes advisable.)

The day before, Sunday, when I was still ignorant of this wisdom, I attended a Swedish Meatball Supper in a church basement. Meatballs for protein, and green beans for fiber to counteract the mashed potatoes. Could be worse. We were fed by Swedes, and it’s always pleasant for a Norwegian to be served by Swedes, after the humiliation of the Outrageous Union of 1814, which we have never yet forgiven.

I was impressed that they served us off china plates. I’ve eaten many a church basement meal, but I think it’s been a decade at least since I last ate in a church basement off anything but paper or Styrofoam. I cannot but salute the diligence of the organizers, who took the extra trouble to wash dishes afterward.

I must also salute my friends, Mark and Renae, who invited me along.

Friday is going to be less pleasant. I’ll be attending the funeral of one the guys from my men’s Bible study. A fine guy who loved the Lord. He used to wear bowties to church, so several of us from the study will be wearing them in his honor. I had to order one from Amazon, but I got next-day delivery, and it’s here now.

Reading notes: The book I’m reading right now (I’ll review it soon; maybe tomorrow) did something that pleased me a lot. A small thing, but it delighted me.

One point I’ve thought about occasionally, over my many years as a reader and writer, was a very trivial issue – the lack of same-name characters in fiction.

This is what I mean – in real life, people with the same first name often show up in the same circles. My Bible study group, for instance, though numbering only eight men on a good night, has two Toms and two Daves in it.

But in fiction, this rarely happens. The reason is obvious, and entirely sensible – it confuses the reader. Unless a plot point requires it, it’s so much easier to just give two characters different names. And since the author is the god of the fictional world, that’s his prerogative.

But in this book, there’s a scene where somebody says, “I was talking to Kate and Kate….” This wasn’t confusing to the reader, because Kate and Kate are throwaway bit characters who never appear again. But the line adds just a half-millimeter of verisimilitude, since we all know that such things happen not infrequently in real life.

That’s a nice literary touch. Wish I’d thought of it.

Uncategorized

Time lost on the road

Leave a comment
Photo credit: Claudio Schwarz. Unsplash license.

Today was one of those days where life reaches down into your calendar and reminds you that there are bigger priorities than the ones you’ve scrawled on your schedule. I went to a funeral today. It was the funeral of my uncle Ralph, not a blood uncle but the husband of one of my mother’s sisters. In terms of our family tree, this leaves but one survivor standing – also an uncle by marriage – in his generation.

Ralph was a plain, cheerful, energetic man who seemed to have discovered the fountain of youth until almost the very end. He worked as a telephone lineman, one of those guys who climb the poles at any time of the day, in any kind of weather. He owned every hand tool known to man, and his eidetic memory knew precisely where they could be located (often in the trunk of his car). If somebody needed something fixed, it was his great joy to jump in and help – and he knew how to do it right, too.

I don’t recall ever hearing a word said against Ralph. He lived into his 90s.

I must confess I was late to the funeral. My brain was absolutely convinced that to travel 2 ½ hours and arrive at 10:00 a.m., I needed to set out around 8:30. The logic of this calculation seems just as unassailable to me as it is wrong in reality.

I’ve done this sort of thing before. I don’t know what my problem is. Certainly it must be partly due to my functional innumeracy. Also I blame my difficulty in visualizing spatial relationships. I need to teach myself (even at this advanced age) to sit down and draw a clock face, and then shade in the hours, when I’m planning a trip.

On the drive I listened to the audiobook of Klavan’s When Christmas Comes. Almost wished the drive was longer.

The same goes for life.

Uncategorized

In memory of Aunt Ada

Leave a comment
Photo by Mayron Oliveira @m4yron. Unsplash license.

Today I once again drove several hours to attend a funeral in a distant part of the state. It was for my aunt Ada. I wasn’t terribly close to her, but I was fond of her. She may have been the happiest of my mother’s sisters (though I wouldn’t be dogmatic on the point). She worked for years as a school lunch worker, and sang with the Sweet Adelines. She was in her 80s, and her death was quick and easy, as such things go.

She was the last person living to have borne my maternal grandfather’s last name. (I’m not telling you what it is, because as you know it’s a common security question.) Though Grandpa has many descendants, they all come through the female line.

Turnout for the service was very good, and about half the crowd was her descendants and their spouses. It occurs to me that a very good (though not infallible) indicator of a persons’ happiness may be the number of children, grandchildren, etc. who show up at their funerals. I know conventional wisdom today says you’re happiest concentrating on career and self-actualization, but I think there’s a lot to be said for big families. My funeral, unless my plan for world domination succeeds, will probably be a fairly dismal affair.

Think how many people you know who have only one child, and are miserable because that child is unhappy or making bad life choices or on drugs or something. When you have one kid, you’re putting all your legacy eggs in one basket.

Have a “quiver full” (as the Bible puts it) of offspring, and you spread out the risk. One of those kids is likely to be happy and successful, and give you some satisfaction.

And let’s face it, “only” kids face challenges. When I was in school, and only kids were rare, it was commonly understood by the rest of us that only children had socialization problems. They came to school with expectations about how they’d be treated that were doomed to be disappointed. They’d missed out on the friction with siblings that prepares one for playing with others.

Advice on family planning, from a childless man. Take it for what it’s worth.

And farewell, Aunt Ada. You did good.

Religion, Uncategorized

The death of a fruitful man

Leave a comment

I went to another funeral today (they come more and more frequently these days), down in Kenyon, Minnesota, my home town. The departed was Jim, one of my dad’s cousins. In point of fact, his farm was right across the road from ours – probably a half mile from house to house, due to the distance between our driveways and the length of his driveway.

In spite of our kinship and proximity, I never knew Jim terribly well. Turns out there was more to him than we ever guessed – farmer (we knew that), helicopter mechanic in Korea, electrician, small businessman, lifelong learner, short-term missionary, skier, and parasailer.

But the achievement that impressed me most, and must have impressed everyone there, was that he left behind a large number of descendants. He and his wife had had five children, and with their grandchildren and their spouses they filled up several pews in our little church.

The virtue of leaving a large family (with a godly heritage) behind is something any Bible character would have understood. Not for them the anxious handwringing of the modern man or woman, wondering if he/she might be “wasting their lives” if they expend their energies and financial resources on “mere” child-rearing. The idea that leaving a large progeny behind is a noble goal went without saying in Bible times.

As I thought about Jim’s life, it occurred to me (and I said it to the widow), that he had lived a really good life. In basic human terms, stripped of fripperies and cheats like ambition and acquisition, he had lived a truly blessed life in a charmed place in a charmed time in history. There are only a few things that matter when you’re on your deathbed, and Jim was rich in them.

Which made it all the more poignant to read this article over at Threedonia (it contains links to a Smithsonian article; I’ll let them have credit) about the great evil and suffering inspired by a book we all trusted back when I was in college: Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. (No Amazon link; the heck with it.)

The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. “The results were horrific,” says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987 exposé of the anti-population crusade. Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

But better that than being a Science Denier, I guess.