The memorial service, on Saturday the 27th of March, began with music (Bach, by a string trio), followed by an invocation from Psalms. Then the woman with the string bass, the man with the fiddle, and the man with a banjo came up and played “I’ll Fly Away.” Then people shared stories, and at the end as people left, the string trio played “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
I talked about how when I was little I wanted to be like David because he was a race car driver, and that’s what every kid wants. But as I grew up, and grew away from wanting to race cars, I learned to admire him for other reasons, and I still want to be like him.
My brother read from the Torah: apparently the section he’d been assigned for his bar mitzvah was also the portion for the day that David died. It was a list of instructions for how to build the ark of the covenant: it shall be made of acacia-wood, and it shall be so many cubits by so many cubits, on and on. Joel said that when he was thirteen, he had a terrible time coming up with some sort of exegesis for this to be read before the entire congregation, but now, he really understands it: God loves precision engineering.
At the end of the program they printed his motto, “there is never enough time, there is never enough money, and nothing ever fits.” True to form, when he was taken away in the hearse, he was too tall for it and they had to bend him awkwardly.
Secretly Ironic 