Bull Remembered

We invite you to join us for food and fellowship in the parish hall after this service, most generously provided by the wonderful parishioners at this my parents’ beloved church.  Please get your food and allow our family to come to your table after we eat so that you do not have to stand in a line.  You may have to wait the same amount of time, but at least you’ll be comfy.  Sit with friends and family, maybe even strangers, and tell each other how you loved Bully.  Take a moon pie and a coke. We are also asking that you video record your remembrances of Bully in the church parlor.

Other than hot, I’m not sure what it was like in Vicksburg, MS, in August of 1927.  I am sure, however, that cosmic forces aligned to bestow an almost supernatural irresistibility on my baby father.  He used to say to me, “Sissybelle, people will tell me anything, the dirtiest of the dirt.”  He was that receptacle because so many felt safe with him.  He loved most the person whose hand he held at the moment.

I want to share with you all some things you may not have known about Bully.

He taught ballroom dancing at an Arthur Murray Dance School and danced with Margaret Truman.

When in 1963, a Marietta, GA, drug store’s water heater exploded killing seven, he sustained serious injury shielding my mother and me.

When we were little, he would draw our portraits on the placemats at restaurants to entertain us.  He couldn’t draw hands, so I was always carrying a purse and Andrew a toy.

He loved the circus, and wore bowties and seersucker suits long after they were out of vogue, which was most of his adult life.

He went to college on a Coca-Cola scholarship.  He had co-cola just about every day of his life.  We drank our first coke from a baby bottle.

He met my mother on the steps of the Emory Library when his shirt size was 14 and his only pair of pants was dungarees.  He used vitalis to hold in place a very poofy pompadour.

He believed he was the only registered democrat in Kane County and, as such, felt it was his solemn duty to serve as an election judge.

He was irreverent to the bone, as evidenced by his meeting and greeting of an Episcopalian monk, “boy, lift up that robe and let me see your sandals.”

He spent entire summers separated from his family at a tuberculosis preventorium in rural MS.

He loved Washington DC above all other cities, but held dear his trips to Jackson, MS, where he saw the Afrika Corps POWs confined in a barbed wire yard.

He would offer advice and opinion, usually unsolicited, occasionally breathtakingly paralyzing, and always without any hint of doubt that he had anything less than divine intervention telegraphing to his mouth.  God help the tattooed and unsuspecting.

We called him Bull because “only Yankees say Dad”  And Papa wasn’t going to work if we didn’t want to be teased.

He loved animals and babies, and his favorite TV program, Mother Angelica on Catholic TV.

Many of you were assigned nicknames, a private code shared with Bully that wrapped you in his sweetness.  “Salvation” was our childhood friend who always rang the doorbell just as we started our chores.

There was no such thing as too much mayonnaise.  The especially repulsive mayonnaise sandwich could be served with the equally disturbing Vienna sausages.

He couldn’t ride a bicycle and was a terrible driver.  As cars flew past us on the right, and occasionally gave us the bird, Bully would laugh and say, “oh well.  I’m better looking.”

He was notoriously non-mechanical. In a fit of insanity, he borrowed a popup camper trailer that we towed behind our station wagon on one of our annual summer vacations, which was, incidentally, always the American library association conference.  Imagine our surprise to see the camper silently passing us on the left and rolling gracefully into the median.  It wasn’t enough that earlier in the day, the propane cylinder exploded when he backed the camper into a tree.

When learning of the naming of my son Rob, he glowingly choked, “no one’s ever been named after me,” and promptly set in motion his response to any important life occasion: he ordered a completely useless monogrammed piece of sterling silver.

Despite the fact that my mother asserted that his initials RB stood for “rooster butt,” he was wholly devoted to my mother and she to him, my mom whom he called the “Christmas lady” because of her lavish commemoration and love of the holiday.

Now he is in a place where he can see my darker side, my foibles and pettiness.  I was crazed when he asked my boyfriends whether they were “nice Episcopalian boys.”  I resented that he was so effortlessly charming and I was so innately serious and shy.  I didn’t want him to talk about books, because he was so smart and well read. And I was not.

And the things you do know…

He loved you all unfailingly.  He was a mentor to many.  He talked about all of you like you were our family.  The slippery description of this man whose essence I struggle to capture did use “southern” as his veneer.  But at his core, he was incapable of loving less than with his entire being.  He was my rock and my fount of unconditional love.

Well, someone in heaven knows which fork to use.  Finally.  Earth will have to suffer.  No doubt our Lord has polished the silver (or, a la Bully, found some unsuspecting teenager to do) and set the table for my father.  I am sure God has been looking forward to embracing this particular soul for 82 years.

Please join my family in celebrating my father’s life.