My mom’s brother Don died this week. He was 76, and in a lot of pain for the last year or so. The funeral was today in a Methodist Church out in the country near the eponymous town of Black Earth. He’ll be buried not far from where he was born, at home on the farm, in 1931. After the funeral, we drove out through those green hills and fertile valleys, crossing trout streams and exploring the winding blacktop roads. We happened upon the Aldo Leopold Nature Center, and eventually found ourselves on top of a hill in Vermont township at the Vermont Lutheran Church. For me, as well as being the church where I was baptized long ago, this is an ancestral resting place. My great-grandparents, my grandparents, and many of their relatives are buried there. We walked through the cemetery and I told Beth the same stories I’ve told her before when we’ve visited. We marveled at the tenacity of those old Norwegians who settled the place, the commitment it must have taken to hitch the horse to the buggy in the nineteenth century to go to church. People came from miles around on unpaved roads to the top of that hill for church services whether it was a snowy winter Sunday or a sunny summer day.
We saw people we only seem to see at weddings and funerals. Some of the relationships are so tenuous (third cousin once removed, I’m not making this up) that we might as well be playing that Kevin Bacon game. Dad was on his best behavior and it wasn’t my day to watch out for him. The older and more demented he becomes, the more he is given to improprieties.
Just a week ago uncle Don was still alive and Beth, dad, and I visited mom’s grave at another Norwegian Lutheran church in a different part of the county. There’s a bronze marker there next to hers with his birth date and a blank spot for his date of death.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
madame l 06.01.08 at 1:04
Please tell me your dad was wearing “the shirt”.
(Lest I seem too flippant about Frank’s uncle’s death, be assured we discussed this earlier, privately.)
Frank Paynter 06.01.08 at 12:23
You know, it’s summertime and that means it’s time to wear “the shirt.” I better be sure we’ve moved it from the house to “the home.”
Dean Landsman 06.02.08 at 6:03
Death is out in full force of late. Been a real tough coupla weeks for pop culture icons. Lost in the last month or so: Dick Martin, Utah Phillips, Jimmy McGriff, Harvey Korman, Sydney Pollack and now, “The Originator,” Ellas McDaniel all in the last 10 days.
The others have electronic media preserving their memories in some manner or another, but Bo Diddley’s Beat will live on forever. Taped out, played, heard in the cranium, it will remain everywhere. Infectious and irresistable, even when not attributed to him — this is the beat that goes on. And on and on.