Dad's Funeral Talk

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 07 Dec 2001 13:01:08 GMT
[the talk I gave at my Dad's funeral, 6 December, 2001]

I've noticed over the past few days that it's the little things about my Dad that really get me, here in my heart. I'm going to talk about some of them, some lessons I learned and some memories.

Use the white pages. If you know the name of the business you're looking for, you'll find it faster in the white pages than in the yellow pages.

Write in the check register before writing the check. Then you won't forget.

Dad taught me to shoot safely, something I'm passing on to my son.

He told me a few times that when he was young he thought that anything worth doing is doing well. As he got older, he realized that anything worth doing is also worth doing badly.

Dad read us a bedtime story almost every night. Steve and I would sit on either side of him on the bed. One of his requirements was that we rub his back. If we stopped rubbing, he stopped reading. And he wore these scratchy wool shirts...

One of his and my favorite books, which he read from often, was the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. I'll mention some short excerpts from three that I remember well.

The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo

Off ran Dingo, Yellow Dog Dingo, always hungry, grinning like a coal-scuttle, ran after kangaroo.
I often felt this way growing up, but I'm slowly getting over it:
For I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.
The Elephant's Child
Down by the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river all set about with fever trees.

Dad was a poet. He wrote little ditties for many occasions. I'm sure lots of you have received his poems over the years. One that many of you have heard, and that I heard many times, is still the message on my Mom's answering machine. You call. It rings. The answering machine picks up, and you hear:

Good morning, afternoon, or eve
Whichever phrase will do.
Your number and your message leave,
And we'll get back to you.

Dad and I both loved the poetry of Ogden Nash.

The Panther

A panther is like a leopard
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch
Prepare to say, "Ouch!"
Better yet, if called by a panther
Don't anther.

There's one experience I shared with my Dad that I remember often. We were driving over the pass on I-80 from Rawlins to Laramie, returning from a hunting trip, I think. It was dark and snowing. The road was a vast expanse of white. No tire tracks. Only the reflectors on the side broke the whiteness. The snow coming down looked like two walls on either side of the car. It was scary. Maybe that's why I remember it. At some point, a tractor-trailor passed us and left two tire tracks in the road. We followed those tracks. Had he driven off the road, we probably would have followed him. But he didn't. To keep Dad awake, I played tunes on my trombone mouth piece. Pfu-pfu-pfuu-pfu.

Dad flew sailplanes a lot, especially after he retired. When you fly a sailplane, you get towed up by a tow plane, then you glide down. In order to stay up, you need to find a thermal, a column of rising air. When you fly into a thermal, a device in the sailplane makes a whistling sound. Then you fly around in a tight circle and rise with the thermal. I went to Scrader Funeral Home yesterday to see my Dad. I saw the place where he lived for 72 years, but he wasn't there any more. I hope that where he is now the thermals are really really good.

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