Lordy, Lordy, look who's way over 40. Yeh, me. How come I don't feel like it? How come my doctor last week found my cholesterol levels were "extraordinary" meaning very good, not very bad? My blood pressure and pulse rate were in good ranges also (usually my pulse runs a little high, but not this time, when it was 74, said the nurse). Coulda been that snake bite on September 8th...
If that's the case, too bad the copperhead venom didn't make me look younger too. I think I look not too old when I check myself out in the mirror, but then I see a photo of me! There's gray hair and then there's shockingly gray hair. Mine is shockingly gray--silver is a better way to describe it. Pre-haps a little darkening lotion would be acceptable? And wearing contacts instead of glasses? My older brother Jeff has never worn glasses (started off with contacts, in junior high) and started coloring his hair long ago, before any gray showed up.
On the other hand, his midsection is looking kinda quilt-like, and mine, except for some droopiness of flesh in the chest area that could be cured if I'd do serious exercise, still looks pretty solid.
The older brother of two friends of Jeff's and mine died last week. The friends are the Owen twins, Joe and John. Their brother was known as Reece, which we always pronounced Reesy, but which now is pronounced in just one syllable. He was 62, considerably older than the twins, so I didn't really know him.
But I did go to the funeral, and it was a good one. Good remembrance or eulogy by a good-looking, black-haired younger woman, and then a good talk by the priest. And unavoidably, a lot of silver hair, so I fit right in. Jeff wasn't sure he could trust his car to get to Pine Bluff from North Little Rock, and thus didn't make it. I briefly saw two of my old friends there--Lee Smart and Mark Townsend. Mark is also a twin, but his twin brother Lane was killed in a car wreck between Little Rock and Pine Bluff during a rainstorm (a car on the opposite side of the interstate hydroplaned and came across the median) in September of that strange year 2000.
And here is a rather remarkable coincidence. The Townsend twins and the Owen twins mothers died on the same day, April 7, 2010. Since they both attended the same church, First United Methodist in downtown Pine Bluff, Nan Owen's funeral was there at 10 in the morning on April 9th, and Wanda Townsend's funeral was held there at 2 that afternoon.
Now back to the present. I was thinking about Lane's death after Reece's funeral, and incorrectly thought the wreck had been on the 15th of September. A few days later I was at Bellwood cemetery, where I can walk while my dog runs around freely, and I noticed, looking at Lane's grave marker, that Lane and Mark were born on November 15 and that Lane was killed on September 24. (I sent Mark a card on November 15, 2000, when I was living in Columbia, SC, telling him about the birth that very day of Walter Gregory Trulock, my nephew, son of my brother Greg and his wife Kristin.)
Now on to a very different, currently anonymous, passing, as represented by the photo below, which I found on the parking lot at the Recycling Center a few months ago. Like some other personal items I find there, it was meant to go in one of the thirty cubic yard roll-off dumpsters as trash, but somehow escaped. I guess this fellow's funeral or maybe just viewing was on September 24th, 1985, and somebody took a photo of him in his casket:
What the photographer wrote across the back is "#10 24 Sept. 1985 Dumas, Ark." Rather impersonal info for such an apparently personal photo. I mean, from the identification of the photo by "#10" it sounds like this was taken by photographer taking a series of photos, not a bereaved mourner or even friend of a bereaved mourner.
If this dead person's (normal) photo was printed with his obituary, I might be able to find his identity... It's easy to look up obits and find them on microfilm at the library. Wait--you don't think someone just laid down in a casket like he was dead to have the photo made, do you? That possibility didn't occur to me until just now, since the man looks convincingly dead. May he be resting in peace.
Which reminds me of what I think eternity must be: eternal, backwards and forwards in time. That means we or our souls don't just pop into eternity when we die. We must always be there, are there now, were there in the infinite past, except "past" is meaningless and so is future, except whilst we are entrained, ignorantly for the most part, in our physical embodiment.
