"What's her name? what's her name? what's her name?"
My brain was working overtime as it appeared that I was not going to be able to avoid a face to face meeting with her.
Just as I heard her son say something about "Isn't that Bev Sykes?" and she turned to stare at me, her name popped into my head. In an instant I had to decide how I was going to handle the confrontation. Our last meeting had not gone well, but that was nearly 20 years ago, so I decided to let bygones be bygones and gave her a hug. She tentatively returned it and made some comment about how "a lot of water has passed over the bridge since we last saw each other." Her daughter suddenly lit up as she recognized me, extra poundage and all and I hugged her. Her son turned his back and walked away.
Ah yes, it's such fun going to funerals.
I had once worked with the people I ran into. It turns out that the son was a very good friend of the deceased. Mike Rivera was the son of a man Walt worked with for many, many years. He had a boating accident last week, at age 43. He had been a Sacramento probation officer and, judging by the comments made by all sorts of people who knew him, a well loved, well respected, much admired man who made a difference in people's lives.
When you only know people from work, you often don't know much about their family lives. I only saw Michael's father very, very rarely...and his mother less than that. We never really had conversations. Walt knew the kids because Dad talked about them, but he didn't know them well either, though it would have been easy to pick Mike out of a line-up since he looked so much like his father.
But we didn't know, for example, that the parents of Ned's friend K.C. were friends of the family. We know K.C.'s parents mostly from Lawsuit concerts and social gatherings, so were surprised to see them at the memorial service.
(BTW, I never knew that "Amazing Grace" has about 120 verses to it. I just wish that church services would choose only three verses of a song and not go to the bitter end. By the time you hit the fourth verse whatever enthusiasm you had when you started the familiar lyrics, lyrics you left behind long ago, is gone and it's just a question of flogging through the lyrics which appear relentlessly, verse after verse, projected on a screen above the altar. Also, why is it that writers of liturgical music set them in keys that can only be sung by a coluratura soprano? You start out OK on a nice mid-level note but by the time you get to the meat of the song, you're either skreetching or have stopped singing. Why does nobody know how to write melodies for the masses?)
But the work people I ran into apparently were as uncomfortable as I was because they hurried out of sight as quickly as I did. I asked where Dad was, my real employer, and his wife waved her arm toward the huge crowd and said "Oh--he's out there somewhere." I never did find him, and am just as glad because I don't know what I would have done if I had. The whole 6 months I worked in that office was one HUGE lesson in why you don't go to work for a family business, if you are the only non-family member! (I do wish the daughter had stuck around today, though. At one point we were good friends and I would like to have found out what she's doing now and how her son, who is an adult by now, but was a toddler back then, is doing.)
On the "Mom-front," Peach took my mother to the wound nurse today and reports that the nurse "wasn't happy." The wound was much redder than it had been (and the pain had increased) so the new plan is to start antibiotics in case she is starting an infection.
Also, the new rule is that she is to have her foot up for at least 45 minutes out of every hour. I had been arguing with her about that and seemed to have lost because the nurse said she wanted her to keep doing her "normal activities"...but she didn't realize that my mother would take that literally and continue to wait on people, cook, clean, etc. and be very adamant that the nurse said she could continue to do normal activities. But it's now been spelled out, with Peach as a witness, and Peach is a stern taskmaster, more effective at riding herd on my mother than I am.
On Friday, which is going to be our next cousins day, she will meet with both the nurse and the doctor who did the surgery. Peach, Kathy and I will all go, which should scare the bejeesus out of them.
(Going to two medical appointments in the afternoon will also mean fewer games of "65" for this cousin's day, so maybe I won't lose quite as much money.)
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