I got kind of curious after writing the entry about my grandads funeral, so I went a-roaming on the World Wide Web. And check out what I found...grandad was IOOF!!
International Order of Odd Fellows, that is. Sort of a workingmans budget version of the Masonic Lodge. Their main thing was disaster relief funds for their members, kind of like Grange does (a rural quasi-masonic temple thingy). And thats how grandad rated the funeral from Verdi!
Grandad was a guy who never learned acceptable English, a drunk, a wife beater and a pig who worked in the woods for months at a time and rather than suffer the disgrace of putting his son out to neibors, left him instead in an orphanage. Repeatedly. And sometimes forgot him there. My memories of him alive consist of: him drinking coffee out of a saucer, him drinking Old Crow with hot tea and a spoon of sugar, him dropping his upper plate at me to make me cry, and either smacking me or tripping me with his cane whenever I came into reach.
I would like to express here my sincere gratitude to the International Order of Odd Fellows for giving me such a vivid, lasting memory of this vicious old bastards final hoo-rah...and for encasing him in not one, not two, but three separate containers-a steel casket, a steel vault and a cement enrobement. That ought to hold him.