Attic Salt for Feb. 19, 2012
Funerals are great reminders
I am at that time in life when funerals come in bunches.
Funerals are great reminders of what’s important and what is not.
The occasion for the most recent church gathering was a memorial service for the mother of a friend. I’d met the mother once long ago.
There was a small gathering of friends and family in what is becoming a too familiar chapel in my hometown. The room was warm with central heating and words of praise as a chilly rain fell on streets where I learned to drive.
At these funerals for old people who were young people who seemed old when I first knew them, I am made aware how much I owe their generation.
To the chamber of commerce, my hometown was a city. Technically, it was a city, but it had more the feeling of a town.
It was a town to the people who lived there, a place my parents, aunts and uncles said was run by “old money.”
The idea of old money intrigued me. What little money I touched as a child were crisp, white and green $1 bills, the occasional five, the rare 10 or sawbuck as my Uncle Bill called $10 bills.
I loved listening to my Uncle Bill, a man more at home in the America before World War II than the 1960s.
When I began reading Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler years later, it was like visiting my, by then, dead Uncle Bill.
Sawbucks are two-by-fours hammered together in the form of Xs to hold logs for cutting. The first $10 bills had the Roman numeral for 10 (X) printed on them. Slang for a $10 bill was “sawbuck” in the lexicon of my uncle.
A good eulogy sends our minds on journeys. A good eulogy is one of my favorite story forms, if done well. A bad eulogy is one in which the eulogist, usually a minister pressed into service for appearance sake, pretends to have known the deceased.
At this most recent memorial service, I was reminded that it takes but a few people, sometimes just one person, to set a young person’s feet on the right path.
At the service for my friend’s mother, an art teacher, her students talked about how Mary Foil had touched their lives, how she’d taken them seriously and taken their attempts at art seriously.
A woman who’d cried through the service said “Mrs. Foil” had talked to her as though she were somebody.
The service for Mrs. Foil brought to mind people who’d talked to me as though I were somebody worth talking to. I remembered a junior high science teacher’s kindness and encouragement. I had good thoughts about an English teacher who told me I could be a writer.
I think what a shame it is that the good dead can’t hear the nice things people say about them at memorial services.
These good dead weren’t kind to young people and helpful to their peers to have us remember them well in churches on rainy afternoons.
They bestowed upon us the gift of themselves because that’s the kind of people they were.
In a small town or a big city, we are lucky if one person has the kind of influence on our lives that Mary Foil had on her art students.
How wonderful it is when our lives cross the lives of such people at just the right time. It’s a wonder that it happens at all and a life-changing thing when it does.