Dad's last laugh

A funeral to remember, a breakthrough quilt, and a new bird card—Trajan Tropicbird!

BARBARA RAMSEY QUILTS

FOR IMAGINARY RAINFOREST, created a decade ago, Barbara used her hand-dyed fabrics almost exclusively. The variations and nuances of color created in the dye process freed her to abandon traditional quilt squares and compose an overall design. She became a kind of abstract watercolorist, a turning point for the quilts that followed. Imaginary Rainforest hung in our bedroom for several years and I forbade her to sell it. See more of her quilts here.

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PERSONAL HISTORY

What is the sound of a hundred million bees buzzing?

Father’s day

ONE OF THE KINDER WAYS to describe my father is that he was socially inappropriate, and nowhere more so than at his own funeral. Even his time of death was borderline rude. He had end-stage lung cancer when he requested that I give his eulogy, which was already a big ask, and then he died in Missouri on the day I arrived in Seattle for my sister-in-law’s summer wedding. I had to book an expensive last-minute flight that barely gave me time to fulfill my promise to the bride to make gazpacho for the reception. According to her gourmand cousin and my to-this-day shame, I shorted the jalapeños. Fortunately, I wasn’t there to see the politely disappointed look on the faces of the wedding guests when they took their first sip. Thanks for that, Dad.

American Airlines did accord me a “grievance” fare—who knew?—and because the flight was mostly empty, kindly upgraded me to first class. Thus, I had a plenty of legroom and wine as I attempted to write something nice about my father. I had trouble. We flew over the Great Salt Desert, which was wider than I remembered, and I still had nothing. When we hit Kansas, though, an idea suddenly struck me: the birds! Yes, the birds would do. 

When I was eleven or so, my father took an ornithology class at the state college in Pittsburg, Kansas. A year earlier, we’d moved from a semi-rural home near St. Louis, where we children happily played in the surrounding forest. We gained important life skills. We built small dams to clog up the creek, learned to avoid copperheads and scorpions, and conducted scientific experiments, such as yanking the tails off lizards and the legs off spiders to observe how they adapted to their new infirmities.

My father had been a truck driver for Kroger for ten years when he decided to finish his college education. He’d dropped out of a couple prestigious universities as a young man—something about bad grades and poor mental health, I was vaguely told. The state college did not have rigid admissions standards and more importantly was affordable to my grandfather, who footed the bill for our family of eight while his son got a degree. So, we landed in Pittsburg, located on a pancake-flat prairie that coal companies had strip-mined for a century starting in the 1870s. They left behind a thousand pits, most of them lifeless.

During dad’s semester of ornithology, the two of us would get up at five to check the phoebe nests he was monitoring and then trek around for a couple hours to look for other species. There were some great birds. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher launch from an electric power line. And I will never forget my excitement when I spotted a Rose-breasted Grosbeak, a new addition to our all-time list.

THE SERVICE WAS HELD in Bolivar, Missouri (locally pronounced BAWL-e-ver) in a funeral home chapel that sat maybe a hundred people when full. (It wasn’t.) I had been in that chapel once before, when I gave a eulogy for my beloved grandmother. I spoke of her kindness, her generosity, her love of art and beauty, and her keen intellect.

My father modeled his funeral service on hers, with one exception, which I’ll get to. I was again to give the eulogy and the funeral director was again to play “Always,” the sweet Irving Berlin song written for his wife in 1925, the year my father was born. In a touching melody, it goes: I’ll be loving you, always. With a love that’s true, always…

The bird eulogy went well, except I couldn’t help notice the sneering look from my youngest brother that said, “you sellout.” I didn’t blame him. As the defiant one, he got the worst of my father’s lashes. But I’m just not the kind of eulogizer who turns into a surprise witness for the prosecution. The other speaker was the guy who did my dad’s stock trades. He appeared a little lost about the task, but he managed to say that my dad always seemed like a nice guy when they talked on the phone. And that he’d made a few good trades during his all-too-short time on earth.

Next up was “Always.” The funeral director apparently delegated the soundtrack to a young assistant less familiar with Irving Berlin than with the glam metal band Bon Jovi. They also have a song entitled “Always.” So rather than a sweet Berlin melody, Bon Jovi came rock-n-roaring out of the chapel sound system with a come-back-baby song replete with sexually suggestive pleas from a “bleeding Romeo.”

When the song blessedly ended, an embarrassed silence fell over the chapel. There was nary a snicker as we paused for the surprise grand finale, something Dad borrowed from a wealthy cousin’s recent funeral. At that ceremony, a bagpipe player had offered a mournful Scottish melody from a hillside near the grave site. 

Dad wanted one, too, but when it comes to bagpipes, there’s a colossal difference between an open field and a thousand-square-foot chapel. Nonetheless, a few minutes after Bon Jovi’s last chords faded, a kilted bagpipe player strode to the front of the room and commenced to blow. According to my research, the bagpipe generated decibel levels of 90–110 dB, amplified by reverberations and echoes against the room’s hard surfaces. “To put this into perspective,” one source tells us, “sound levels above 85 dB can potentially cause hearing damage if exposed for prolonged periods, and sound levels above 100 dB can cause immediate harm.”

More subjectively, as a person who experienced that bagpipery in that chapel on that day, I can testify that all human cognition abruptly halted. My body entered a heretofore uncharted dimension of the vibratory universe where a hundred million bees buzzed in synchrony. Blood was rearranged. Brain cells died.

When the cacophony finally ended, the traumatized mourners were invited to file past the open casket. Save for a scowling whisper from the youngest brother—“just making sure the SOB is really dead”—the slow march went uneventfully. That is, until my father’s third and final wife approached. I had attended their wedding and, shortly before he walked down the aisle, he’d told me, “Well, I married two smart women and that didn’t work out, so I thought I’d marry a dumb one.” I can’t attest to her intellect one way or the other. I can say that she was quite a large woman and that when she suddenly threw herself across my father’s body and wailed there was a moment when the casket came precariously close to tipping over and spilling him out. For this funeral, that might have proved a fitting end.

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BIRDS-OF-A-TYPE CARD SERIES

Trajan tropicbird

AMONG THE HALF dozen pelagic species I’ve photographed at Kilauea Point in Kauai are Red-tailed Tropicbirds, one of which I chose for cover of my book Aves. These birds and their white-tailed cousins change altitude while making broad circles around the headland. They are small and fast, so getting them in focus and tracking them as they circle is athletic—and great fun. On a spring visit, my wife remarked how happy I looked. This angelic bird had caught the updraft and was hovering about twenty feet above me. When I returned to our condo and saw this frame, I let out a cry of delight.

TRAJAN’S COLUMN in Rome commemorates the Emperor Trajan’s victory over the Dacians of Transylvania in the second century. The inscription at the base is forgettable boilerplate about a great and powerful emperor who smote his enemies. But the lettering carved into the stone has proved an inspiration for a couple millennia of calligraphers and type designers. Many public buildings were carved with those letterforms in mind, especially in Britain. Frederick Goudy drew three arts-and-craft typefaces based on the Trajan lettering, including one called Goudy Trajan. This 1989 version was designed by Carol Twombly, who drew or re-drew a half dozen faces for Adobe. As in the Roman original, there are no lower-case letters, so the font is used exclusively as a display face in titles. Elegant is the word I’d use to describe both font and bird.

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