A Dixie Carpetbagger

I had to do something this weekend I hate doing.  I had to bury a family member.

Coming from an older family, I have to do this every so often.  My maternal grandmother, then my father’s father, then his mother, then two of my uncles, with other family members sprinkled in between.  I swore off funerals, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I would send a card, flowers, and visit the family, but I couldn’t bear another funeral.

Then my dad died.  Not exactly an optional funeral.  Not only did I have another funeral to visit, I needed a suit– which isn’t “off the rack” for a guy my size.  So, in the middle of all the preparation, I had to visit a tailor.  I was looking for something I probably would never wear (or want to wear) again.  What I came out with was the most perfect suit I’ve ever worn… for one dollar.  You see, I took a paid week of vacation off from my job, and they– without me knowing it– gave me back the vacation time on the sly.  One perfect suit– one dollar.

This weekend, I pulled The Suit out of the closet.  Oh, I wear parts of it (usually just the slacks and shirt) every now and then, but only for funerals do I wear the entire thing.  Pulling it on is almost a ritual– from the dress dress hose (calf-high like are worn with kilts) to making sure the handkerchief is tucked into the breast pocket (and make sure another one is tucked into the right hip pocket…) to the dress boots I always wear.

The Suit came out of storage for my cousin.  The son of a Baptist minister, he was a WWII SeaBee, who would not speak of his time in the Pacific.  The only thing missing from his service was a reference to the Navy’s prayer for burial at sea.

“… looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at Whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto His glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.”

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Other families are pulling out their suits today.  One of the pro-liberty crowd is absent– straightarrow has passed on.  The man was almost ever-present on gun blogs, always sharing a bit of his wit in every comment.  To some, he was blunt– I just thought he was honest.  Allow me to quote something that was quoted over at Weer’d's–

…our concept of freedom and liberty, not exactly the same things, has been so diluted in our modern citizens that they really have no mental capacity to deny their emotional training, at the hands of government, to see clearly what has been lost.

Even though the intellectual capacity may exist in its raw state, the spirit needed to question oppressive authority is all but dead in a great many of our people. Many of them being too young to remember liberty are not aware that what we now have hasn’t always been so. By the time they gain enough wisdom to listen to their elders, their elders have died, taking with them the ideals of liberty and rugged individualism that made and kept this country great for many many decades. Until modern media simply overwhelmed truth and history. –Straightarrow

Here’s to absent friends.