Life Has No Scorecard

When the first seven bullets went off, I jumped.

By the time the second set fired, I was a little more comfortable.

The third round barely phased me.

It was 4:23 P.M., and we all gathered around a body, watching flames spew from rifles poking holes in a grey sky. A few minutes after the 21-gun salute, an American flag was laid over the coffin. Someone (I never know who is in charge of this) turned a crank and lowered my great uncle into the ground.

Another casualty of a callous universe.

It strikes me how old everyone looks at this funeral.

Old mothers are holding old babies who will die. Old wives handing tissues to old husbands who will die. Old tombstones gather to watch the burial saying “Come. Join us.”

My younger cousin pointed a finger at me.

“You’re getting grey hairs in your beard.”

And so I was. When did that happen? I walked off the graduation stage, turned the tassel across my mortar board, sat down, and then woke up with a mortgage, a car payment, a wife, and an endless stretch of days all of which asked the question:

“What now?”

What now — after the comfortable structure of school has been removed?

What now — after grades don’t matter?

What now — after you are released into The Great Indifference?

We were fooled. Life has no scorecard.

I think that’s why these Internet things have us hooked. We are desperate to quantify our existence. If we can put a number on what we do, maybe it will ease the gaping crater in our hearts.

Even at parts during the service, I wondered if I was going to write about this. I wondered how I could tie it in with the other work I do. I wondered if people would like it.

But I found no tie-in. Sometimes all I can do is tell you what happened.

Here is what happened:

Gene Calton died.

At the funeral, we sang songs he composed.

At the funeral, my cousin Nick read an article our uncle wrote under a pen name. He had been a writer. Like me. I never knew that.

At the funeral, I learned after a producer saw him play guitar and invited him to California, Uncle Gene turned down a Grand Old Opry life for a made-his-heart-melt wife. They had 6 kids.

At the funeral, one of my relatives reminded me that the deceased — a man I remembered mostly for wearing camouflage pants, holding strings of dead fish and saying “hey there young feller!” — held a PhD.

(And I remembered you can’t always judge people by what they look like.)

At the funeral, I stopped writing a blog post in my head and cried along with the rest of my family.

Because sometimes, family is all we have.