Arkansawyer

My Uncle Grant, the baby of my mom’s family, died on Saturday, October 27, 2007. The obituary doesn’t say much, but what it says is accurate:

SPRINGDALE — Grant Watson, 83, of Springdale died Oct. 27, 2007. He was born July 5, 1924, at Boston Mountain in Johnson County, to Charles Thomas and Trissie Caroline Collins Watson. He enjoyed hunting and fishing.

Survivors include two brothers, Searl Watson of Deer and Roosevelt Watson of Albany, Calif.; one sister, Golda Adams of Springdale.

Services will be at 2 p.m. today at Swain Community Building with Loren Collins and Johnny Case officiating.

Burial will be in Swain Cemetery.

Arrangements are by Holt Memorial Chapel in Harrison.

It doesn’t mention that he was a Naval veteran of World War II, or that he was a factory worker all his life. Those things should be important to everyone.

To me, it’s important that he was my favorite uncle when I was a child, the person who first discovered I could read, on the patio of my parents’ house on Cedar Avenue. It’s important that he took me to see Springdale and Fayetteville play basketball, back in the seventies. It’s important that he hired me to do occasional work in chicken houses. It all mattered.

He was a kind, gentle, particular man, talkative yet shy in a way that’s disappearing from the hills, and no longer so shy as he aged that he would not allow you to take his picture.

I wish I had the eulogies of the two men who spoke at his service to print for you. Loren Collins and Johnny Case knew the man and his life, and it showed in their remarks. While they were larded with specific religious sentiments that I don’t share, they were also filled with a general sense of goodwill and love (particularly for the hills and those who live there).

There was music, and tears, and then we buried him.

That’s where.

I’m nearly fifty years old, and I’ve been to my share of funerals and services, but this was the first time I’ve ever been to a family funeral as one of the responsible adults. In the past, that’s always been my mom’s business (or my dad’s, but his side of the family is not so near). This time, my mom was unable to make the trip out to the services, or even participate in planning them, so it fell to me to join my cousins Paula and Jim and Jim’s wife Marilyn at the funeral home and at the florists’ shop. That turned out to be very easy for me, as they’d planned well, but it reminded me my mom is really slowed down. She won’t be fixing food for reunions any more. That’ll be for me to do for a while. And all too soon, we’ll gather and do this again.