This Week's Funeral...

     The first time I met Roger Billings was in high school.  He was the boyfriend of one of the girls I ran around with, Joanne Scoby.  Roger was wearing the uniform of the day, tight jeans, white t-shirt and a black leather jacket.  He had dark brown hair and wore it in a pompadour with a big curl on his forehead.  He was Fonzie before there was Fonzie.  All of us thought he was one on the cutest guys ever and Joanne kept him close.
      Move ahead a few years, we were all newly married.  Vern had been hunting, shot a pheasant and I knew that Roger was an outdoors man and so invited Jo and Roger to dinner.  He was so nervous,  - pardon the old expression 'like a whore in church' - this really cool looking dude was so insecure meeting new people.  He survived the meeting  - and the meal - and before long he and Vern started hunting and fishing together.
      He loved the outdoors and eventually meeting new people and over the years, Keith and Marge Lee, Roger and Joanne and Vern and I traveled together on long weekends into the North woods.   Many good memories and lots of fish pictures and stories.
     Today, walking into the service, I met Jerry and Glenn Lee and sat with them and they started telling Roger stories.  Jerry told how he was so impressed as a little guy that Roger had taken a label maker and on everything he owned, and Jerry stressed everything, he had the label:   'Roger Billings - Fisherman'. 
      Roger's dad was a dentist in southern Illinois and was abusive to him and when he was four his parents divorced and he had little contact with his father after that.   Roger and Joanne had three boys, one died at birth, young Roger who died in his 20s from heart failure and Jeff, who at age three fell off a bridge in Wisconsin while everyone was fishing, and drowned.  I remember Jeff's funeral, the little casket and Jo and Roger trying to console all of us. Joanne developed a disease called Scleraderma and as the disease progressed, she became harder to live with.  He did all the cooking and cleaning and tried to make their lives as easy as possible.  After Joanne's death, he married Fran and they were pretty simpatico and they  loved going to flea markets and traveling.  And Roger was an avid Cardinals fan.
     This poem was in the funeral program:
                             I still see him in the early dawn,
                                  that big smile on his face,
                            with rod and reel and tackle box,
                              heading for his special place.

                        Or gathering his gun and that old dog,
                              down the road they'd go.
                                      The joy he got from those short trips
                            Was more then we will ever know.
             
                    He's come home now, as the sun sets west,
                        with that same big smile on his face.
                      He's landed the big one, the very best...
                        and Heaven is now his special place.

     The poem is so appropriate for Roger and this man who had so much sadness in his life and always seemed to rise above it is now in a good place.  Rest in peace, Roger Billings - Fisherman.