Spits and Wiggles

I had the great privilege of officiating my grandfather’s memorial service this past Saturday. I have performed and preached in front of people more times than I can count, but I was nervous about this one. Nervous that I wouldn’t do him justice (I’m not sure anyone really could) and mostly nervous I would ugly-cry in front of a room full of people I didn’t really know that well.

I got through it. (If you saw my IG story and prayed for me, know that I felt it.) Part of the reason, I think, was because I actually wrote down every word. I usually type up an outline, or some notes, because I don’t want my face to be buried in notes, but I knew I would need all the words for this one. When I started to lose it, I buried my face.

Anyway, I have all the words, so here they are, for the people who have asked for them.

Disclaimer: This was written to be spoken, not read. Believe me when I say that the editor in me does see all the run-on sentences and improper punctuation. The poet in me insisted on keeping them so the reader might feel the movement of it.

Words for my Pawpaw

Good afternoon.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name’s Alexis — or Lex, Lexi … or Kate, depending on whether you knew my great-grandmother — and I had the esteemed pleasure of being Mick Sullivan’s favorite granddaughter. (The boys will say it’s because I was his only granddaughter, but I maintain that it’s a trivial technicality.)

Some of my earliest memories of my pawpaw are of him sitting on the edge of one of the two twin beds, in an upstairs bedroom, in their old house on Main Cross. Whether we were here for a week or a weekend, my little brother and I slept in that same bedroom, and he would come upstairs every night, once we were in bed, to tell us bedtime stories.

There were one or (maybe) two pieces of fiction in his repertoire, but he mostly told us stories about the gas station that his father ran, about life on the farm, about being the only 5th grader in his one-room country schoolhouse, about his dogs (Tate and Blackie) …

But there was one story that we (mostly my little brother) asked for every night. This story has always been catalogued in my mind under non-fiction, but I don’t really know if he told us it was true or if I just assumed it was — because most of his stories were.

The story begins the day someone in town got a monkey. (You see why I’ve started to doubt it’s veracity.) Not an ape, but a small monkey, and it was kept in a domed cage/enclosure. And the story goes that the kids in town took to teasing and pestering the monkey, until one day when the monkey had had enough and it climbed up on the inside of the cage … and peed on all those children.

We laughed every time.

Because no matter how many times he told it — and he told it almost every night — he delivered it flawlessly. He set the stage so well you could see yourself on it. And even though the details remained consistent (which may have lent to my thinking it was a true story), he would just masterfully vary which details he shared or left out on any given night and push that rising action until the tension was just right to deliver the punchline*.

I will grant that we were not exactly a tough crowd, but I think everyone in this room will also grant that the man was a storyteller.

So many of us here, and scores more people besides, knew him in so many ways. Not just as a father, grandfather, brother-in-law, etc. … but as a teacher or coach, as a coworker or a soldier, as a hunting buddy (or fishing buddy … or golfing buddy), as a church member and elder, as a neighbor or helper … but I’m willing to bet that all of us also knew him as a storyteller.