Life goes on
Aug. 12th, 2007 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersI'm back from a week of vacation with the family at my parents' place in Central Oregon. It was more eventful than our usual family vacations, that's for sure. I arrived last Saturday knowing that my sister-in-law's mother was on the verge of death. She died on Sunday, I think it was, although it may have been on Monday, I'm not sure. Time doesn't mean so much when you're on vacation. The funeral was for sure on Wednesday in Corvallis though. In the meantime, my brother, nephews, and I rescued some people on Ochoco Lake, out near Prineville, by sheer chance and pluck.
But that's a long story that I don't really want to get into in detail. Suffice it to say that we fished for crappie for a couple hours or so, until we'd caught a fair bunch, and then we went for a joyride to the end of the lake at the elder nephew's instigation and thereby found four people bobbing in the water next to their capsized boat. It had flipped over when they were pulling a gigantic innertube device, swerving in S-curves back and forth as they went, until the boat lost its balance. We pulled them out of the cold lake water, shivering uncontrollably after ten minutes in it, gave them our dry shirts for warmth, and towed their boat to shallower water by the shore in case it sank. 45 long minutes later, the rescue sheriffs finally showed up and, after the assembled menfolk were unable to flip the boat aright, towed the upside-down boat back to the boat ramp. It was quite an adventure, and my nephews were very excited about it, while my brother and I were rather more jaundiced about the intelligence of those involved.
The drive to Corvallis on Wednesday through the Santiam Pass -- I drove my mom, dad, and sister in Mom's Prius -- was beautiful. Endless primeval forest and craggy volcanic buttes and mountains, a twisty highway running alongside a twisty river, work crews patching sections lost in winter mudslides. We arrived just as the funeral was starting, and a doorbell sounded as we walked into the hushed funeral home. Who's there? The funeral was short and sweet. I didn't know Fran very well, although she was no stranger. She was a big-hearted boozy working class broad, all give and no take, for better or worse. My favorite story at the funeral was from a woman who told of a birthday party Fran threw for herself. "If you bring any gifts," Fran warned everyone, "I'll toss you out of the house." When the guests arrived at the party, she had gifts for all of them instead. That's typical of everything I knew about her, mostly from my sister-in-law, who loved her like breath, and from my brother too, and the love she had earned from the assembled family, friends, and neighbors was powerfully evident in the tears and quavering words at the service. The younger nephew had to leave the room near the end, the feelings were too strong, first grandmother lost. It was all plain and simple and direct and common (as in commoner), no grandeur invoked, but poignant. The last song was "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes -- a recording -- the same as played at her son's Marine funeral when he died in a civilian plane crash as a young man years ago.
After the funeral, my uncle Truman wanted to know why I hadn't performed the service myself. "I don't do funerals," I said, not that I'd been asked, nor should I have been. "Weddings are hard enough."
"Well, you can do my funeral," he said, and I don't think he was teasing. Do I need to learn how?
My brother had played me and the boys the two songs he wants played at his funeral, as we drove to and from Ochoco Lake. The day after Fran's funeral, as we all sat around the dinner table back home, drinking wine, he said, "You know what songs I want played at my funeral, and I want you to perform the service."
Right. Like I would be anything other than an emotional wreck at my own brother's funeral!
The newlyweds came over for a day before the funeral. "One person dies, so it's time for a new life," Jake told my niece, his wife, patting her belly.
"Oh. My. God." she said, blushing and rolling her eyes. Later my sister told us that her daughter wants to wait a year before having children, but she does want them.
There were other, lesser adventures over the course of the week, including the latterday discovery of the balancing rocks above the Metolius arm of Lake Billychinook, a small wonder of nature and erosion. I also read Homer Eon Flint's The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix, two proto-scientifiction novellas reprinted from Argosy All-Story that are, two years later, even pulpier -- smoother and more dramatic, but probably more formulaic or derivative -- than his The Lord of Death and The Queen of Life from All-Story in 1919. After that, I started reading John Crowley's Endless Things -- the fourth and final part of his enormous other-historical novel, AEgypt, twenty years in the making -- and it is, to coin a fricking phrase, fucking brilliant. It reads like a prayer and a poem and a meditation on the improbability of closure, evoking the word-world with open-ended mystery, opening it up like a book. Every sentence is inevitable yet unexpected. She's gone. Yesterday my first flight back to Seattle was canceled, and I almost didn't mind because it gave me more time to read the book. Two different people asked me about it. "Do you like to read?" one asked me. It was a good question. Do I like to breathe?
The world is full of endless things, coming and going. We say goodbye to Fran and remember that we'll follow her before too long. Meantime we pull strangers from the lake and live to tell the tale. "My wife," the guy who had just totaled his boat so foolishly finally realized as we headed back up the lake toward the boat ramp, "is going to be soooo pissed." He seemed to be looking forward to it with perverse relish. Better pissed -- or pissed on -- than dead, perhaps. "She's going to be so pissed!" he said again, singsong, fatalistic, as we all laughed.
And so on.
But that's a long story that I don't really want to get into in detail. Suffice it to say that we fished for crappie for a couple hours or so, until we'd caught a fair bunch, and then we went for a joyride to the end of the lake at the elder nephew's instigation and thereby found four people bobbing in the water next to their capsized boat. It had flipped over when they were pulling a gigantic innertube device, swerving in S-curves back and forth as they went, until the boat lost its balance. We pulled them out of the cold lake water, shivering uncontrollably after ten minutes in it, gave them our dry shirts for warmth, and towed their boat to shallower water by the shore in case it sank. 45 long minutes later, the rescue sheriffs finally showed up and, after the assembled menfolk were unable to flip the boat aright, towed the upside-down boat back to the boat ramp. It was quite an adventure, and my nephews were very excited about it, while my brother and I were rather more jaundiced about the intelligence of those involved.
The drive to Corvallis on Wednesday through the Santiam Pass -- I drove my mom, dad, and sister in Mom's Prius -- was beautiful. Endless primeval forest and craggy volcanic buttes and mountains, a twisty highway running alongside a twisty river, work crews patching sections lost in winter mudslides. We arrived just as the funeral was starting, and a doorbell sounded as we walked into the hushed funeral home. Who's there? The funeral was short and sweet. I didn't know Fran very well, although she was no stranger. She was a big-hearted boozy working class broad, all give and no take, for better or worse. My favorite story at the funeral was from a woman who told of a birthday party Fran threw for herself. "If you bring any gifts," Fran warned everyone, "I'll toss you out of the house." When the guests arrived at the party, she had gifts for all of them instead. That's typical of everything I knew about her, mostly from my sister-in-law, who loved her like breath, and from my brother too, and the love she had earned from the assembled family, friends, and neighbors was powerfully evident in the tears and quavering words at the service. The younger nephew had to leave the room near the end, the feelings were too strong, first grandmother lost. It was all plain and simple and direct and common (as in commoner), no grandeur invoked, but poignant. The last song was "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes -- a recording -- the same as played at her son's Marine funeral when he died in a civilian plane crash as a young man years ago.
After the funeral, my uncle Truman wanted to know why I hadn't performed the service myself. "I don't do funerals," I said, not that I'd been asked, nor should I have been. "Weddings are hard enough."
"Well, you can do my funeral," he said, and I don't think he was teasing. Do I need to learn how?
My brother had played me and the boys the two songs he wants played at his funeral, as we drove to and from Ochoco Lake. The day after Fran's funeral, as we all sat around the dinner table back home, drinking wine, he said, "You know what songs I want played at my funeral, and I want you to perform the service."
Right. Like I would be anything other than an emotional wreck at my own brother's funeral!
The newlyweds came over for a day before the funeral. "One person dies, so it's time for a new life," Jake told my niece, his wife, patting her belly.
"Oh. My. God." she said, blushing and rolling her eyes. Later my sister told us that her daughter wants to wait a year before having children, but she does want them.
There were other, lesser adventures over the course of the week, including the latterday discovery of the balancing rocks above the Metolius arm of Lake Billychinook, a small wonder of nature and erosion. I also read Homer Eon Flint's The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix, two proto-scientifiction novellas reprinted from Argosy All-Story that are, two years later, even pulpier -- smoother and more dramatic, but probably more formulaic or derivative -- than his The Lord of Death and The Queen of Life from All-Story in 1919. After that, I started reading John Crowley's Endless Things -- the fourth and final part of his enormous other-historical novel, AEgypt, twenty years in the making -- and it is, to coin a fricking phrase, fucking brilliant. It reads like a prayer and a poem and a meditation on the improbability of closure, evoking the word-world with open-ended mystery, opening it up like a book. Every sentence is inevitable yet unexpected. She's gone. Yesterday my first flight back to Seattle was canceled, and I almost didn't mind because it gave me more time to read the book. Two different people asked me about it. "Do you like to read?" one asked me. It was a good question. Do I like to breathe?
The world is full of endless things, coming and going. We say goodbye to Fran and remember that we'll follow her before too long. Meantime we pull strangers from the lake and live to tell the tale. "My wife," the guy who had just totaled his boat so foolishly finally realized as we headed back up the lake toward the boat ramp, "is going to be soooo pissed." He seemed to be looking forward to it with perverse relish. Better pissed -- or pissed on -- than dead, perhaps. "She's going to be so pissed!" he said again, singsong, fatalistic, as we all laughed.
And so on.
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Date: 2007-08-13 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 12:31 am (UTC)She was a hobbit!
A blessing on her memory.
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Date: 2007-08-13 02:10 pm (UTC)Also thrilled by your immersion and joy at Endless Things -- I love your words about it. Hey, I edited that book! The final scene is several hundred words longer because I kept good-naturedly harassing the author!