Old Guy's Rambling Remembrances #33

FUNERALS INSPIRE MEMORIES
9/25/98

Juanita was my parents’ neighbor for twenty years or more. The funeral played to a packed house. Obviously, my mom and dad were not Juanita’s only friends. I was very pleased to see that three of my four daughters were able to make it, as well as my sister and her husband and two of their three daughters.

The service inspired a lot of thought about my parents, who have passed on within the last few years. My father was William Palmer Holmans, and I am William Clarence Holmans. Family members still call me “Little Bill”, or “Billy”, and as long as I knew her, my mom called me her “little boy”.

My dad was a great guy, who in my first year of college, gave up the “secure” job he had taken with the Postal Service when he had decided that it would be necessary to settle down and provide a stable environment for his small kids.

After giving up that job and going back on the road, he never had another of his chronic headaches and became more secure and happy in his life than he had ever been in the twelve or thirteen years that he was with the Post Office.while my sister and I were growing up.

Every year, he would go to the furniture market in Chicago, and often would go by automobile, car-pooling with other members of his profession, and driving straight through to Chicago.

At the reception following Pop’s funeral, the conversation got around to one of Pop’s sales buddies who had died in Dallas on the same day as Pop, a few hours later. It is said that the man’s wife remarked, “Just enough time for Bill to come by and pick him up”.




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