@ Duck and Decanter

Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.

Childhood piano teacher of Lester William Polsfuss in a note to Lester’s mother.

As reported in New York Times article Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94, August 13 2009

You may know Lester better as Les Paul. He died Thursday, 13 August 2009.

@ Duck and Decanter

Sometimes my mother asks me if I went to the National Cemetery in North Phoenix. She usually asks this after some holiday weekend when she and my brother have gone to the columbarium where my father’s ashes are. I am sympathetic but my answer is always the same. “No, I didn’t go this weekend, maybe next.” My dad died last December. I don’t think my mom is taking his death very well. She is having a difficult time of it. As is my brother. I remember my brother once telling me that he could not imagine life without our parents. My brother has always been closer to my parents than I am. The lack of attachment I attribute to the fact that I was left in care of my maternal grandparents before the age of six months and not re-united with the rest of the family until after the age of 18 months. It was during this period that my brother was born. So it was that I never bonded well with my family.

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The lack of bonding at an early age has very little to do with my refusal to visit with my father’s ashes. Before his death I visited with my father nearly daily, first in the rehab facility and then the group home in which he was placed. I was his most frequent visitor. I wondered at the time if perhaps my lack of closeness enabled me to visit him more often than the other members of my family. I still wonder. The real reason why I have no intention of going to where his ashes are stored – ever -, is that for me the remains in the columbarium are a collection of atoms that formerly were part of my father’s body. Those atoms have been around for more than 4.6 billion years. They have been around ever since they were formed in the nuclear furnace of the unknown star that died to give life to our solar system. It is difficult for me to become nostalgic about something that old that only spent the last 8o odd years as part of a human body.

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As far as I can tell, I am in the minority in holding this opinion. Last June I read about a seven year old boy that fell into a canal in Salt Lake City. Tuesday (4 August 2009) I read in The Salt Lake Tribune article, McEntee: Finding Trejon a final act of love, how they found his body. The body apparently floated down the canal and into The Great Salt Lake where it was found last Saturday (1 August 2009). He was found by friends of his grandfather. The grandfather never stopped looking for Trejon.

It’s what those who love the missing almost always do. They marshal their strength and hope, their friends and relatives, and they never stop searching.

As reported in The Salt Lake Tribune article, McEntee: Finding Trejon a final act of love, 08/04/2009

I can understand searching as long as there is hope for life but it has always seemed to me that there is a point after which all you are looking for is a body. What is the point of that? From a somewhat different perspective I read of finding the only MIA from the first Gulf War. U.S. Pilot’s Remains Found in Iraq After 18 Years was in the New York Times but the same story was carried in many papers across the country. It seems that 18 years ago some Bedouins found the dead pilot (apparently he did not survive the crash of his aircraft) and buried him. Recently an Iraqi led some US Marines to the grave. The navy took the opportunity to get a little propaganda in:

Our Navy will never give up looking for a shipmate, regardless of how long or how difficult that search may be.

Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations as reported in New York Times article, U.S. Pilot’s Remains Found in Iraq After 18 Years , August 2, 2009

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I am glad that the families of Trejon Fite and Capt. Michael Scott Speicher can have some closure. But for me I always think of these words in similar situations:

… let the dead bury their own dead…

Jesus of Nazareth, as reported by Matthew and Luke, ca 30 CE

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There is something I am a little curious about. Why did the Bedouins bury an American pilot in the middle of a war?