Orange Rhyming Company

UNCLE CHARLIES LAST RIDE

Looking odd, the funeral procession exited that parlor, never to be “caught dead in”.  My Toxic Orange, 6.4 Hemi, 470 HP muscle car, with Street Racing Technology logo, attracts enough attention already. As caboose to the flashing light convoy, exacerbated by the fluttering little funeral flag, uncle Charlie was going to be planted.

A war vet being buried a few hundred feet from where he lived his adult days. He lived 93 years, smoked like a trooper, then the inevitable. It is very interesting to learn details of passing relatives who lived real lives containing real events. Charlie was a WWII pilot and interesting guy who immigrated from Alabama to eastern Canada. He was like us all, good points and some not.

My rear vantage point embedded in the procession, offered a world of psychological observation. Times have changed and it was intriguing to view the behavior of those encountered enroute to the internment. Some people have awareness which cedes the right-of-way to the procession. Others are hesitant. Which course of action is correct? Hurried schedules translate into “hurky jerky” car movements of hesitant stop and go behavior. Funeral protocol just is not taught and hence this gray area of behavior.

Folks once held a firm view of the momentary pause and acknowledgement of a life lived, even for those they didn’t know. Cars pulled aside with respect for deceased as well as the grieving. Today life is fast paced. Who has time for interruption from a dead stranger? Slowing and pulling to the side of the road, there is just no assured quid pro quo. It is over, lets get on with life before our time slot expires!

Why the funeral director led the hearse through the traffic rotary circles in town, defies imagination. With wonderment for the ensuing chaos, multiple merging, crossing and stopping, turmoil took place at each turn. Traffic circles are the worst engineered construction possible, devised by theoretical cheapskates, with budget constraints. It avoids expensive on & off ramps. Certainly funerals, are not part of the consideration. Uncle Charlie and the family made it through without mishap.

This ride, (I confess to blues music blaring inside my car), took me to thinking about another funeral procession to that same cemetery. This for my grandfathers grandmother, over a hundred years previous. She was a full blooded Passamaquoddy aboriginal. Unique for her time, Suzanne was able to read and write, while her husband, but scratched X’s. This of course makes me a sixteenth aboriginal, not enough to block a road and avoid jail but indeed, enough to care about my native heritage.

This Maliseet woman was reputed to be a respected, beloved inhabitant of New Scotland, an area of 40 close-knit families. She left an interesting mark upon her community when she passed away. Details are sketchy but the general story fits with history. The rest is from oral traditions!

Funeral processions are as old as the hills among our species and once involved wagons, rather than horseless-carriages. Traffic circles then, existed in Rome or other burgeoning cultures where they were called Roundabouts. There is technical difference about the exiting lane strategy but you might do your own research with that distinction of little difference.

Worry not, this is no tale about traffic jams in Gladeside. Conceptually similar, the old fashion wagon procession carrying the remains passed through the community on the way to final rest. Folks stopped work for a spell to gather at the end of their lanes. Men, though largely hard working illiterates, knew to remove their hats, allowing that wee moment of deference to the deceased as the funeral wagon passed by.

The presiding preacher would travel with the body, acting as funeral director, spiritual leader and general chief-cook-and-bottle-washer. This particular guy was having trouble navigating social orders of the day. That is, discrimination was the norm and that “savage” living among them, did not merit the entire dignity warranted towards white folks. Like any good politician, he chose the unworkable dysfunction of the undefined middle ground!

This pillar of community leadership, with Godly plan, devolved into political and social choice. Declaring there would be a funeral procession and yes indeed, burial with family among the white folks, “good church goers shall not congregate at the roadway”, as the wagon passed. He had to make a distinction  between Indians and white folk, even in spite of neighborly norms. About as sensible as quibbling over traffic circle names and declaring the superiority of roundabouts.

While no social media shone the light of reason upon ridicules assumptions of that era, each community had the grapevine. This was the precursor to Facebook. This was their social conspiracy! They feared the power of hellfire damnation which might rain down upon them from God almighty, if not visited upon them by that preacher himself. They however defied the pontifical ideas of the preacher and gathered to honor what they felt towards my grandfathers grandmother. Due respect was chosen over fear and ignorance. Quite a bold step in the social order and times of that period.

The rebellious actions detonated when the wagon passed the end of each lane. The good folk gathered but turned their backs upon the moving procession. They had expropriated the idea of deniability. They  claimed adherence to some lesser acknowledgment of Suzanne Stover as dictated by the powers that be.

I choose to think they gave vent to that inborn respect for the deceased and the good person who lived. Simultaneously, they showed their backsides to the church authority, avoided his wrath but truly indicted him as an ass, by presenting theirs, politely towards him.

While uncle Charlie had no folks standing at the end of their driveway, he did have unknown people stopping, removing hats and showing behavior lacking in many, past and present.

Is it much wonder that wise king Solomon of yesteryear biblical times wrote, “it is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart”?  Uncle Charlie’s last ride made me think of all this, I share, if only for my own personal edification.