*2 Day Diet Progress at end of post
Death trumps all. With many topics in mind as I sit down to
write today, the funeral I attended yesterday has to come first. For seventeen
years, from 1975-1992, I lived on 17 acres in Roane County, WV, between two
Moores: Daryl and Nina (pronounced nine' ah -- she was her mother's ninth child, and I suppose she'd run out of names) Moore and Frazier and Bernice (pronounced Ber’ nis ). I
built a house there, and it’s where, with my ex-wife, Pat, we raised our
daughter, Hannah (thirty-seven this week), who now lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Daryl was Frazier’s uncle, and when I first moved there, they were friends who
helped each other out, plowing a garden with a pony, getting a chain to pull a
stuck vehicle out of the ditch on the steep, muddy road we shared with two
hairpin switchbacks (that’s redundant, but maybe everyone will understand one
or the other).
Frazier worked for Pennzoil in the local oil and gas fields
and Daryl drove a water truck delivering water to schools (hmm, correlation? I
don’t think so; just a lack of a water system and dependence on wells) Sometime
in the eighties Pennzoil went on strike and Daryl’s son-in-law took a temporary
job as what was euphemistically called a “replacement worker”, known among
union guys as a scab. Frazier held Daryl responsible for his son-in-law’s
choice, and they never spoke again, that is, Frazier never spoke to Daryl, and
he also did some unkind things I won’t go into. Not quite a feud, but
definitely a falling out. Daryl was a very laid back country boy at heart, he
loved to farm and he had, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful, well kept,
“head of the holler” properties you’ll ever see. He died a few years ago of
complications from diabetes, and Nina, now 84, still lives in the
house alone, her daughter and son-in-law who live on the paved road at the top
of the property her only lifeline. She never learned to drive.
Frazier, who had moved to South Carolina to be near children
and grandchildren, died in a car accident last week at the age of seventy-six.
His children brought him back to West Virginia to be buried on the homeplace,
just down the holler from my (former) property. I’d watched the kids grow up,
and two of three of them are parents now. Ginny (Virginia), told me that
Frazier used to stay up late into the night sitting on their porch to listen to
the fiddle music drifting down the creek from my house.
Ginny asked me to sing Country Roads (aka Almost Heaven,
West Virginia) at the gravesite ceremony. He was to be buried across the small
creek from his house in an area he had used as a garden that would now become a
family cemetery. Kenny asked me to sing Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” I
spent the last few days learning and practicing it.
The funeral itself was in a little country church, one room
and some picnic tables outside. A woman who sounded a lot like Hazel Dickens
sang a couple hymns, including Will the Circle Be Broken. A soft spoken man
Ginny had asked to lead the bulk of the service talked about Frazier, read some
handwritten tributes in a hesitant and stumbling way, and spoke confidently
about the need for all of the forty or so people, local folks who have no doubt
been hearing this message all their lives, to understand that death is only
temporary if they just give themselves over to Jesus to be saved. The regular
preacher took up that message a little later in the Evangelistic preaching
style full of praise Gods, dear Lords, shortness of breath and exclamatory
explosive Hut’s and such. It was somewhat hypnotic, but thank goodness he did
not actually do an alter call and ask people to join him, and no one offered
to.
I don’t think Frazier was that much of a churchgoer, and I don’t
think his kids are either. He struck me as the type who might stand in the back
of the room with some of his buddies. If Tears in Heaven as a choice is any
indication of belief, it reflects a bit less certainty, “Would you know my name
if I saw you in Heaven?” And the youngest, around thirty, spent some time in
front of the open casket speaking to his father, begging him tearfully to open
his eyes, “just open your eyes, just come back to us, it’s easy,” and assuring
him when he didn’t respond that he would see him again someday, and reassuring himself that even
though they disagreed about a lot of things, that they always talked later and
forgave each other.
I also took the opportunity on that beautiful cool spring
day to sit on the porch with Nina, who, perhaps reflecting on Frazier’s
passing, showed me a quilt she was working on. She has always made quilts. She
does the embroidery by hand, but the actual quilting on a machine; I’m not sure
if among aficionados that counts as hand-made. She told me a story about a
grandson who had asked for a quilt to put in Daryl’s casket, and when he’d come
down from the upstairs room where she keeps them with one he said Daryl had
always claimed as his own, she decided she ought to have one for her own casket. As
I left her, I said, “Don’t be in a hurry to finish that quilt.”
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| I love the tilt of Daryl's cap. They were married in 1947. |
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| Nina's making this for her casket.... |
