Tragicomedy

My dear readers: Please enjoy Friday Letter #80. You may miss me for one or two weeks; we’ll be in Seattle to watch son Ben “graduate” from the Navy after 21 years.

A Fort Lupton funeral

Last Saturday, Laura and I closed up shop and drove to Fort Lupton to attend a memorial service for a childhood acquaintance of mine.

Family and friends of Kristine Counter gathered at the First United Methodist Church to memorialize her life. I was unusually drawn to the event.

Although I never became well acquainted with Kristine, one couldn’t live in Fort Lupton for long without knowing her.

She was a dynamo, a vivacious child, an exceptionally active girl and then a powerfully aggressive and attractive woman, diminutive but with the biggest, most consistent smile you’ll ever have the good fortune to see.

An auto crash shortened her life to 62 years. In addition to the loss sustained by her family and friends, the world loses as well.

Kristine had trained herself as a teacher, and diligently earned multiple qualifications to teach in several states. I suspect she was just into the prime of her professional life when she died. I am deeply saddened. My condolences to her family.

How do I know?

Mostly, I knew who Kristine was. I never had the pleasure of any closer acquaintance.

So how do I know what the world lost when Kristine died?

It’s easy. My own mother died in 1976, when she was even younger than Kristine.

Mom had just gone through Hell (with a capital H) in her own teaching career. Mom was quite likely the ultimate first-grade teacher. Ask her pupils. Many, many remember her fondly – for what she was able to teach them.

Like Kristine, she had continued to educate herself, as well as her pupils, through her life.

Unfortunately, Mom encountered a young and arrogant grade school principal; they butted heads, and the young man pulled enough power from his position and she was fired.

It blew her out of the water. She was devastated, destroyed, deeply damaged. She thought people would come forward in her defense. Pshaw. For a long time she couldn’t do much but try to drink away the problem.

Just when it seemed she would get her feet back on the ground, she suffered from an infarction of the lower intestine and died, only 61 years old.

Mom was on the verge of setting out in a new career, teaching teachers how to teach. Pity. The world was the big loser.

Perhaps you can understand why I was so mysteriously drawn to a funeral for a woman I hardly knew. There was a psychic connection between my own dear mother and Kristine.

Then there’s the church itself

Piled on top of all this is the fact that the site of the memorial service for Kristine was the very same First United Methodist Church in Fort Lupton where I was baptized early in 1943.

Those of you who know me have probably already heard how deeply important my baptism has become to me.

I have come to understand that my parents’ wish for me was that I would spend my life as a Christian. That’s why they went to the trouble of having me sprinkled. (They were Methodists after all.)

Mom was one of the teachers of Sunday School in those early days, along with Vacation Bible School and other activities. Later on, she wouldn’t do so well.

Mom and Dad insisted that my brother and I would attend church: they themselves didn’t go. That and overwhelming social factors of the 50’s and 60’s gave Dick and me the idea that it wasn’t important.

But at the beginning, before I was even a year old, their intent was for me to be a Christian. The dear departed Fr. Bud Raney would often say, “What matters is the intent, Tom. It’s the intent.”

So sort of by default, the plain jane Methodist Church in little Fort Lupton
is and always will be dear to me.

A spanking from Gramma

One Sunday in the summer of 1952, I decided not to go to Sunday School. I told Dad I wasn’t going. He responded, “Get on that bicycle and get down to that church in time for Sunday School.” No options were offered.

I protested, “You don’t go to church.” He said nothing, but I knew better than to continue in disobedience.

Something strange happened on the way to that little Methodist Church. I was going to ride by my Gramma Hodge’s house and wave. But the bike turned in there somehow, of its own accord.

Gramma let me have a Nehi strawberry soda pop and asked me why I was dressed so nicely if I was just visiting my old grandmother.

I tried to lie, but she wouldn’t have it. “You were supposed to go to Sunday School, weren’t you? You pick up that phone and call your dad to tell him where you are.”

I was reluctant to do so, obviously. “Dad doesn’t go to church.” Uh-oh. Wrong thing to say. Gramma put me over her big knees and swatted my behind two or three times; I made the phone call.

Only time Gramma ever spanked me. Only time I had it coming.

A really dumb thing

My Dad was a determined man. He was determined to see to it that his own wife and children didn’t have to go hungry or get cold, like had happened to him and his family in the Great Depression.

In the Fort Lupton days, Dad just didn’t take a day off. Seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, he’d be working: butchering hogs, making ice cream, driving a school bus, selling Rainbo Bread and Meadow Gold milk, volunteering to fight fires.

He “didn’t have time” to go to church. But one fateful Sunday he did take time. I remember the white shirt and the necktie Dad put on to accompany Mom and me and my infant brother to church.

It was that very same First United Methodist Church in Fort Lupton.

As we climbed the long front stairs, the mortician, Charlie Lundien, the greeter that Sunday, waited for us.

With that big-toothed undertaker’s grin, Charlie reached out his hand to Dad and said, “Well, look what the cat dragged in!”

Dad turned around, went back down the steps. To my knowledge, he never went back to worship services again.

Now you’re going to say Dad shouldn’t have allowed a stupid comment from a dense individual stop him from attending the church of his choice. True. But Charlie’s stupid mistake was Dad’s lifetime reason.

Another time, another funeral

Hop into the Wayback Machine for the sad story of another funeral.

In 1985, Dr. Earnest Pearson died. He was family physician to the Hodges and about half of everybody else who lived in Fort Lupton.

It was he who provided the diagnosis when I contracted Poliomyelitis at age four. It was he who patiently came to our house when Mom got panicky over a simple scab on my knee.

It was Dr. Pearson who got Dad into the school bus business. (I’ve written about this before. Dr. Pearson prescribed “two hours of rest” daily for my workaholic Dad. So Dad drove a bus – one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon. Two hours of rest.)

I was painting a bathroom in a rental apartment in Brighton when my brother came by to tell me the news that Dr. Pearson had died.

That news wasn’t the worst thing in the world – Dr. Pearson was elderly, and had lived a productive, active, useful life.

But get this. Dick also had to be the bearer of Dad’s edict: Tom wasn’t to attend the funeral. Tom would embarrass the family, and so shouldn’t be present.

Even more sad was the fact that I obeyed the edict. I was only 40 and my backbone hadn’t grown in yet. I didn’t go! Instead, I sat outside in Dick’s motor home, with my nephews, terrified and pouting.

To be sure, I’m not happy that Dad is deceased. But these days, nobody tells me whether I can go to a damn funeral. Nobody.

Days in history

So there you have it. Memories of different times in the history of that old church in Fort Lupton. Sad, for the most part. Joyful in one way – that old church was the site of my baptism, helping lead me to my Catholic Christian perspective today. I’m thankful for that.

Word of the week: Tragicomedy. It’s from Latin and Greek, of course. It means a play or other literary work combining tragic and comic elements. Or, a real situation or incident like this. Sound familiar?

This week’s alternative word: Barnacle. Middle English and French, bernicle. Shell bearing sea animals that attach themselves to rocks or ship bottoms. Hence, a person hard to get rid of. A barnacle differs slightly from a pariah.

Gripes? Complaints? Whines? or Comments? Adoration? Puppy love? Reciprocal rant? Feel free to express yourself in the comments below!