No More Ooglephants - Paul Reuben Finholt

 It has been a busy few days. I have been working washing dishes and working my way through Indiana's constitutional history. 

CC took me to the post office on Wednesday and then we had dinner, talking about religion. 

Yesterday, I got news my cousin Paul Finholt died. He had surgery recently, and his other leg was amputated. Strange to think of him dead. He was the last of our cousins. The universe seems smaller now. He had been the one who tried to throw me into the ocean back in 1967 and was there when I caught the eel. He taught me about French cuffs. We had not always gotten along, but he and his brother were the older brothers I never had. In 1965, I had been chasing them and slipped on the wet concrete and sliced up my eyebrow. I became a Boy Scout because of them. He had gone to a prep school in Chesire, CT, and been a basketball star there. That makes the amputations seem so horrible. He is why came to read Hamlet and Waiting for Godot while a teenager, his mother sent his school books to us and I decided if my cousin could read them then so would I. That makes the amputations seem so horrible. He had raced sailboats. When he came to college, it was to Purdue and when there he taught me to eat to eat oysters on the half shell. Fifty years ago, he had a passing resemblance to Ryan O'Neal, and there was the prep school thing, and so we called him Preppy for a while.  He had raced sailboats. I never knew why he came to die in Kokomo. He was not from Indiana; he would not move here when I tried to get him here in 1991. Thankfully, he had my sister close by. She was left to make arrangements with the funeral home and secure his home. It will be a direct cremation, no service or wake is planned. This may be the only commemoration of Paul Reuben Finholt. There were three wives, and a son I never met.  It had been over a year since I saw him last.

I get these email updates from Sister Vassa - she is an Orthodox nun and a lovely writer - and days before I got the news of my cousin she sent out     COMMEMORATING THE DEAD. I have been meaning for days to post a link to it, but today it seems even more appropriate.

When we commemorate our dead, we “exercise,” so to say, our rejection of death in a faith-inspired way, as we “look for,” and pray for, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come, as we profess at the end of the Creed.

My Uncle Bob, Paul's father, used to tell us kids stories about the ooglephants. They had the boy of elephants with wheels instead of legs and a pig's tail. No more ooglephants.

And to top off the night - well, almost top off the night - the PO made his appearance. I think I saw in his eyes that he knows the group therapy is merely a bureaucratic exercise, without a therapeutic purpose.

I have almost finished off the current section of the article. Then I will take a break for other projects and reading.

I actually topped off the night by listening to the presidential debate. Terrible.

Computer acting up and now I am late for work.

Have a good day.

sch