What that last post was about

Lately I haven't had much time to write. And even so, not everything I jot down gets into the blog. Sometimes I write a couple paragraphs on a scrap of paper, and it gets tucked away in a notepad, never to be read again. Maybe I throw it away. Here's something I wrote on November 9, but I was in no mood that day to post it:

Tonight I attended the wake of a friend. One of my college buddies. As Vonnegut would say, "So it goes." Except it should have gone another way. I'm old enough now where, if I still had a beard, parts of it would be gray, but I'm still young enough that I'd be more likely to be standing up at a friend's wedding than to be standing over a friend's grave.

At the wake, there was an open casket. In my religious tradition, that's just not done, and I had managed to get all gray-bearded without ever having been to a wake with an open casket. So I go into the funeral home, and there's my friend, sort of. His face was heavily made up, and to be honest, he looked like a wax-museum model of himself. Had I actually been in a wax museum, I would have said, "Yeah, that's him, but they didn't get it quite right." My friend had an expressive face, and the expression they left on him was utterly blank.