[Conservababe]

My mother retired and bought a log house on a canal in the Atchafalaya basin. It was not a retirement community by any definition. It was no rules, as in crude camps beside nice homes. And it was a menagerie of all kinds of folks, from toddlers to older adults.

A man named Art lived there. He had retired from a job in Lafayette in the helicopter industry. He was a skinny old coot. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes from the time he got up until he went to bed. He used to tell the children to go play in traffic and other assorted unsocial suggestions. And all were used to his antics and loved him. One time he swam across the canal into my mother's deck with a knife in his mouth. She told him to lay down on her deck and sleep it off. He did. They were good friends.

Anyway, a friend found him dead in his home the other day. He had been estranged from his family for a number of years. When they finally were able to contact a son, the son said that he would be arranging a military funeral. The friend was surprised and said that he had never known that Art was in the military.

Seems that Art was a demolition expert in the Navy (I assume before the name of Seals was adopted) and a survivor of Pearl Harbor.

And he never said a word about it, ever, to us.

[westmex]

I'm not having a military funeral...Have a prepaid cremation and burial at sea plan....

There is a National Cemetery not to far from where I live, but the flags are always being stolen, graves crapped on and condoms scattered around the place from sex parties....

I'd rather have the whales crap on me than the scum that's around these days.....