The Cool Side of the Pillow

I keep thinking back to it, so I should go ahead and capture it, however faintly, for the future. At the service for Ernest Leake -- father of Mike and Pam -- in Pittsboro a week or so back, one of Mike's cousins, I think it was, fully rocked the memorial sermon. He is a preacher by profession, so one would hope he would do so, but they often don't.

Ernest, AKA Uncle Buck and a couple of other nicknames, was like the cool side of the pillow, i.e. when you turn the pillow over at night to put your head on the cool side, a "universally recognized moment of calm and refreshment," something like that. I knew exactly what he was talking about but had never heard this called out as a metaphor. Somewhere in there Mike's cousin either exhorted us, or told us that Uncle Buck did, live life as if in "atmosphere of prayer." Honestly I don't remember how he took us there but it was a great phrase which continues to echo in my brain.

Then the preacher switched gears. He took us back to being in the kitchen at family gatherings which grandma grabbed a hot tray of biscuits out of the over with a wet dishtowel and then went around the table making sure everybody got a hot biscuit. And then, remarkably, he looked out across the assembled family and pulled out a quick anecdote or attribute for each of them: "Aunt Jenny and her perfect Sunday hats, Cousin John telling stories about high school football glory days..." honestly I don't remember any specific thing he said about anyone except he touched as many people as he could, really quickly, and brought them all in. All in all he did a remarkable job doing what the best public speakers of all sorts need to do, traversing the distance between the general ("cool side of the pillow," "atmosphere of prayer" -- which Uncle Buck was and to which we should all aspire) and the specific (the call outs to family members). He blew the textbook out of the water.

I have been at memorial services in recent years in very formal congregations where the officiant clearly had not met the deceased and had barely thought about what he was saying, "in his decades at UNC Memorial he touched the lives of hundreds if not thousands of patients" (do the math moron, in decades it was clearly thousands). After a friend's disappointingly generic service at Chapel of the Cross a congregant there explained to me that the uniformity of services was meant to convey our equality before God. I've since gone to much better services there, so clearly the clergy were just slacking off in this case. The family had been shellshocked by the death.

Uncle Buck got much better, as did we.