A Great Gentleman
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Collette was awake by quarter till six. This gave her plenty of time to start cleaning out the 3,300 emails in her old Juno account.
Meanwhile, Francis learned how to tie a tie for the first time by himself.
Carrie-Brie, having erected The Berlin Wall to divide one set of bunnies from the other, was having issues prepping the creatures for the day…
“Earnest! Earnest! Are you eating oats! Earnest! Bad! This is a bad day for Earnest!”
The black bunny had apparently been on sentry duty for the past several days.
“I can just see them destroying each other while we’re gone today,” Carrie had said with a little worry. “I can see Earnest now, ‘Ketseh! Tear down this wall!’”
Then something about rescuing a little bunny from the jaws of Snuggles that week, and performing surgery and massive tick removal…
Martha arrived at eight o’clock to join the eight on the road, Dad driving her car, accompanied by Mom, Francis, and Linnea, with the other four in Mom’s Fit.
It didn’t take long for Carrie to switch on the radio…
“Ok, Carrie cannot be in charge of the music,” Rose groaned. “Ever since she got her bunnies, she has terrible taste in music.”
“Easy like Sunday morning…” Carrie replied, as “don’t go chasing waterfalls” boomed over the speakers.
“This is not good music on the way to a frunral,” Rose insisted.
“Might help your case if you could pronounce ‘funeral’ correctly,” Collette suggested.
Rose practiced throughout the day.
It didn’t take long to make the road trip interesting…
“Is that Clifford?” Joe asked, as they pulled onto the highway.
“Wow,” Carrie replied, staring at the giant red dog waving from the top of a cherry picker across the street. “How did I not even see that until you pointed it out?”
Then the jolly guy at the Starbuck’s window asked cheerfully…
“So, what are you all up to today?”
“How long is this trip anyway?” Rose asked shortly later…
“Three hours and forty minutes.”
“Uck. And all I brought was this.”
She nodded to a stack of Calvin’s commentaries, a commentary on Proverbs, and Julia Child’s “The Art of French Cooking”.
A few other minor inconsistencies along the road…
Rose commenting on how tire covers of flowers with “Life is Good” written across them should be replaced with rotting vegetables and “Life is Bad”…
Some “Journey” air guitar in the front seat…
“Ok, Carrie,” Rose instructed. “Take it away!”
Joe joined her…
“Only one of you can take it,” Rose ordered.
Something about “horse parking” on the service road…
“What!” Rose squawked.
The pick-up in front of them had a blow-out about an hour before they groaned into a McDonald’s…
While they killed some time over lunch, they compared facial features and eye colors amongst the tables…
“Francis’ eyes are turning hazel.”
“That’s from the chlorine at the pool.”
“Joe… Joe doesn’t look as much like a Snicketts as the rest of us,” Carrie concluded. “His bone structure is different from Francis’ too.”
“That’s because I work out,” Joe offered.
“I finished my meal first,” Rose crowed.
“Rose always races with things,” said Joe. “She probably races her cats to see who loses.”
Then they compared the shades of white amongst their various sets of chompers…
“Are mine yellow?” Carrie asked, flashing a blinding line of pearls.
“I don’t know if your teeth can turn yellow anymore,” Francis replied.
An arrangement of velvet-red roses graced the edge of the silver casket in Independence.
Uncle Balthasar and Aunt Tuulia walked up shortly later…
“Won’t be sitting by these troublemakers,” Uncle Balthasar grinned.
Then Jashub, Blessing – donned in strings of pearls, and Uncle Hilario and Aunt Corliss.
Uncle Fred had selected “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Amazing Grace” for the hymns of the service.
So many people had come, many of them pausing at his casket in tears.
Collette had heard of all Uncle Fred’s generosity and volunteer work as a CPA and with the Boy Scouts and the Methodists and everything else, but she hadn’t realized the extent, the volumes of people he had reached, and the complete volume of the help he had given people throughout the state.
Of course no solemn event could be complete without just “a little” mischief… prior to the start of the service of course.
Comparing Dad’s and Uncle Balthasar’s bald spots…
“Mascara!” Rose soundly chastised Linnea. “You can’t put on mascara at a funeral!… Collette, tell her. Hey, don’t those things on Mom’s dress look like the stuff that falls from the trees and gets all mushy on the ground?”
It sort of did…
At the rate of six kids rocking back and forth to carry on conversations over each other, they resembled more the metal keys of a music box than a solemn set of siblings waiting through an hour visitation.
Uncle Fred would have found a chuckle in there somewhere.
The procession – which Francis had mistakenly labeled a “parade” – to the gravesite lined up quickly, with instructions to switch on lights and hazards…
“Turn ’em on,” Rose instructed.
A police escort guided them the entire way into Odessa, all the cars pulling over to the side of the road as they passed, which was something new. Rose was tickled with the escort in particular, three officers on motorcycles, leap-frogging their way to close off intersections and on-ramps.
The shadow-heads from the Toyota in front of them showed Linnea napping on someone’s shoulder.
As they arrived at the cemetery, Francis quickly emerged from the vehicle…
“Can’t you take Linnea in your car? She keeps using my shoulder as a headrest.”
They remembered the quiet cemetery surrounded by green fields, the traditional family burial site.
Dad and Uncle Balthasar volunteered to help with the casket.
Jashub tapped Linnea on the shoulder…
“If they need any more help, you and me can go over there.”
Linnea grinned.
After a few more words under the little tent, all the family plucked a rose, each, from the arrangement on the casket. And except for Carrie almost blacking out standing in the back, all went well.
It was good to see Uncle Fred in such a quiet place, just like it would have been out there when he was still a kid.
They would miss him.
As usual, great Snicketts minds thunk alike…
While their own gathering cut off at a random exit down the road for a combined Taco Bell/KFC, they watched the Black gang turn off to McDonald’s across the road for ice cream, the same one they had hit first on the trip out. Dad called up Aunt Corliss…
“…yeah, we’re just across the road… Uh huh… Love you too.”
Sometime after seven, Collette was deposited on her doorstep as Carrie remembered the current state of bunny battle on the home front…
“Dear Lord, please don’t let me come home to a stack of cotton balls!”
And finally Collette joined her boys – Puck sound asleep with a recovering ear and a brand new red bike from Theodore and Gloria for his birthday – and OLeif watching episodes of “Malcolm in the Middle”.