[Jeb’s Witness at DJC Sr Funeral the day after Easter 3-24-2008.]

Thank you all for coming today. Your presence here, at the Rosary, and over the past Easter weekend have meant so much to my Mom and our family.

My father always enjoyed a Richard Lopez sermon—short and to the point. In that spirit, I cut this in half.

My Dad did not raise me to correct a priest, so Father Paul, this isn’t a correction so much as a question. Father Paul told us all that we do not have to worry about my father making it to heaven. My brothers and sister were talking about that earlier, and I’m not saying we’re worried. There’s just a question.

It’s now 12:08. Exactly seventy-two hours ago, my brother and I were on the golf course with my Dad. He was handily out-driving, out-chipping, and out-putting both of us on a beautiful Good Friday. I tell you that because my brothers and sister are not sure that 72 hours is enough time for Dad to finish comparing notes with St. Peter at the pearly gates. If not, he’ll be in heaven soon enough.

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It felt a little like homecoming weekend with Gramalie and Grandad returning to Tucker, Danny up for the weekend, and Nicole in for the day Saturday. And in a complex exchange, a hitch-hiking frog will travel from Florida to Georgia to Alabama.

Nicole, Kathy, and I went to watch Claire play soccer Saturday morning while Danny and Kelly slept in. Unfortunately Claire’s asthma kicked in early after several sprints up and down the field, so it was a short game for her.

Kathy and Nicole dressed up and headed out to cousin Andrew’s wedding shower. Danny and I converged over at Gramalie and Grandad’s with Ted to welcome them home and get their computing equipment updated. I brought the Flower Power iMac that Fionna passed down to Grandad. I had performed a brain transplant (hard disk) from the Blue iMac with a bad power supply. Ted brought over a memory upgrade for Mom’s laptop. And we all took a look at the HP desktop that Patsy sold them. It will be good to get Dad’s documents all migrated over to a “this century” computer. For example, he’ll go from a full 10 Gig hard disk to a spacious 250 Gig drive. He likes the “TV” on the HP, which is what he calls the flat panel monitor.

Ted copied all of the original FOPAB editions that he had scanned into PDFs onto Mom’s laptop. Dad spent some time opening those and reading them, which he thought was amazing.

I showed him the “history” files that I was loading into MediaWiki (like Wikipedia), and he read a few of those.

Saturday night, the six Stonegaters had a nice dinner together, and then played a round of Apples-To-Apples. Danny reported this was one of the more even rounds we had ever played, everyone getting a good share of wins. Once again I won overall (not sure why), so the group focused on who could come in second. Kelly took second place with much delight.

Nicole headed back home Saturday night, so she was unable to join us for a big breakfast at Killian Hall put on by the Knights of Columbus Sunday morning. We then headed over for church. We were asked to bring up the gifts… probably because we were all dressed up pretty nice, although I was out parking the car when we were selected. Beautiful sunny day and a fine homecoming weekend.

About the frog… Gramalie discovered a white tree frog hiding in a potted plant she brought up from Florida. Danny and I took the plant and frog home to figure out what to do with it. The frog had stayed crouched in the dirt all the way up from Florida to Tucker. But as soon as Danny stepped into our garage, he jumped out, through the VW’s open wheels, and climbed up to hide on the rear axle. Stout was very excited about all of this. Danny finally caught the frog. We put him in a plastic container, and Danny will take him down to Mobile where the weather is more Florida like. Gramalie has a picture of the frog. Perhaps she will post.