A friend's father died a few days ago. It was not a tragic death; he was very old, had been miserably ill for years, and badly missed his wife of 57 years, who died a couple of years back. He got a proper send-off yesterday. A preacher spoke briefly and to the point. We sang hymns. The Masons conducted their elaborate, touching ceremony, then an honor guard of Marines from Corpus Christi delivered a 21-gun salute, folded the flag properly for delivery to our friend, and finished up with a very fine "Taps." The Masons put on a lunch for the visiting family.
Ray Brashears joined the Navy in 1944, then again in 1945, having been ousted the first time when they discovered he was only 17 years old. He served in the Bikini Islands during the atomic testing there and was one of the few surviving members of that cohort. He settled in our neighborhood in 1974, which by local standards made him quite the old timer. He left nine great-grandchildren.
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I happened to be seated at dinner tonight next to an older British gentleman, an expert on Augustine, and we were making conversation about places we'd been. He mentioned Iraq, so I asked after the circumstances, and he said he'd been there in the British Army in 1956. That was just over fifty years before I got there. We'd been to some of the same places.
It sounds like not very much had changed, save for the worse, in the ensuing period. A tremendous amount was exactly the same.
Wow! That's not your run-of-the-mill Iraq reminiscence. Not that any of them are.
One of the members of the honor guard at the funeral had nearly frozen his feet off in Korea, when I was in diapers.
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