Michael Fleming’s Eulogy for Paul William FlemingSt. Anthony’s Church, Casper, WyomingJune 2, 2003
I don’t know whether it’s an enviable or unenviable position that I’m in, to eulogize my own father, but I’m deeply honored to have been asked to do so. I’d like to begin by thanking everyone for coming. I thank all of you for loving my father. I’d like to thank Father Carr and the altar servers, Bustard’s funeral home, those who brought flowers, and our musicians: Janeth Stearns, Emily Runge, our flute soloist, our singers, Leo and Ken Malson, and my sister, Polly Earl Grimshaw. And thanks to our collage artist, Karen Hegna. I hope that everyone got a chance to take a look at the collage when you came into the church. It’s a beautiful tribute to my father’s life, made out of all the little odds and ends that show the various facets of his life. It was easy to get the pieces because Dad never threw anything away, and now we can thank “Packrat Paul” for leaving such a good record of a life well lived. On your way out of the church, please take a very careful look at the collage. Many of you only know my father from one or two areas of his life, but with the collage you get a sense of the whole man and you can acquaint yourself with him. So I’d like talk about some of these different aspects of his life and the kind of man he was in each. I first know him as a father; some of you here know him as brother, husband, or grandfather. He was a wonderfully dedicated family man who prayed for nothing more than the prosperity and growth of his family. Particularly its growth in size — he was quick with fertility prayers that he would add to the end of evening grace, especially when my sister Jane was present. As wonderful a father as he was, though, he was really born to be a grandfather. The proof of this is that it took my nephew, Matthew Earl, to finally discover Paul Fleming’s true name. You don’t see it in the paper, you didn’t see it on his professional sign outside his business, but at the age of about two years old Matthew called him Bumpa, and that really stuck. From then on we all called him Bumpa. He was Bumpa. And somehow the way it made us feel to call him that, and obviously the way it made him feel, suggested that Bumpa was the person he was born to be. He was a soldier. You’ll see one photograph of Dad in the regimental band — the proudest part of his service for his country. Very, very briefly he was the first person in North America to know about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Oddly enough, one of his main accomplishments in the Second World War was to learn Spanish really well — he was stationed in Panama. The other thing that he accomplished in the service was to win $10,000 off other soldiers, playing poker. Some of you may know my father as a card player. But to give you a sense of the man: he was the big winner on his base, but one of the biggest losers was a certain pilot who lost $3,000, which was real folding money in those days. And while his debt was still pending, the pilot spun in, as they said in those days — meaning, he drove his plane into the ground and was killed. Before his death he had told his wife about his gambling losses, and she was terribly concerned to treat those debts honorably and to see the debt was paid back out of her widow’s death benefits. But Dad would have none of it — “Keep your money.” Many of you may know him as a dentist, and I ought to tell you that my proudest moment as a first grader was when he came to Mrs. Brubaker’s class, where we were learning to read over in Garfield School. He taught us about dental hygiene. And he had a big tooth that I thought was just about the neatest thing there was, and a big toothbrush to go with it. Everyone in the class was astounded that one of their classmates could actually be the son of this paragon of oral hygiene. He was a wonderfully dedicated man. For almost 40 years, bad back and all, he leaned over people’s open mouths, usually whistling and singing. He once told me something that astonished me. He said, “You know, Mike, just about the hardest thing is to get up and go to work every morning.” I was amazed at that because I had thought he loved nothing more, and yet when I thought about it I realized: what a discipline for him it was. It was a spiritual discipline, too. Simply to get up and go to work every morning, something he did absolutely faithfully for nearly 40 years. A few of you who knew him in the early 1950s may remember him as a very elegant and dapper man-about-town. Most of you who know him from the seventies and eighties probably wouldn’t expect this — those of you who know him from recent decades probably think of him in those crazy jumpsuits that he discovered in about 1971 (and would never let go of). But way back in the early ’50s, Life magazine did a story about Casper, Wyoming — “The City of Bachelors.” Casper was booming at the time with the oil industry, filling up with young men, the way that Rock Springs or Gillette is now. Life did a photo spread, and two of the photos showed Dad. One of them was a collection of all the bachelors of Casper who had been gathered into the little park in front of the Federal Building — amongst the hundreds of young men, there was Dad. But then there was another one of him modeling a very sprightly plaid jacket, a sports jacket from Harry Yesness haberdashers downtown. They wanted to make sure that everyone in America knew that these eligible young bachelors in Casper, Wyoming, were well dressed, and there was Dad to prove it. I’m sure that some of you know him as an outdoorsman. Nothing is fonder in my memories of my father than his teaching me the stars. He thought that it was so important for me to know the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the North Star, and so forth, and he inaugurated me into the mysteries of the universe that way. He also took me fishing about a thousand times. (He took some of you fishing about a thousand times — maybe 900 more than you really wanted to go.) He was the skipper of the ugliest boat on Alcova Lake, and the boat’s motto was “It takes three people to fish: one to fish, one to steer, and one to bail.” He was an avid hunter, often going out to Wilbur Stearns’ cabin at Deer Creek, south of Casper, for antelope and deer and elk. He was a very ethical hunter. He believed firmly that it was a great moral responsibility to take a life, and if you kill it, you eat it. And so we had antelope lasagna, deer tacos, elk goulash — things like that. One time my father and I were hunting in the mountains, and Dad spotted a big buck one hilltop away from us. He was a very, very good shot, and at the distance of a good two hundred yards or more he managed to hit this buck, which went flying up in the air, landing on its back. Clean hit, clean kill — we thought. But when we started towards this animal, he somehow managed to stagger to his feet and disappear over the hilltop. We took out after him. By the time we got to the hilltop where he’d been, we saw him disappearing over the next hilltop. We tracked him by his blood spoor for miles and miles and miles, Dad getting more and more distraught, because the idea that he had taken this animal’s life, and that we couldn’t be responsible for it by taking it home, absolutely broke his heart. We continued to search for the buck until dark and finally we had to give up. But I think that gives you a sense of the man. A few of us are unlucky enough to know him as a cook. His one culinary gift to me is popcorn — that’s the one thing he made well. He made a horrible breakfast mush every morning that terrified the rest of us in the family (we were terrified that we’d have to eat it). Jane remembers that all the trout that we brought home, which should have been nicely pan-fried with a little butter and lemon, were instead put into the horrible earthenware vessel that turned them into the mushy, lumpy gruel that he was so proud of. Anybody who has ever borrowed tools from Dad perhaps knows him as a homeowner. He was a great tinkerer and putterer and discover of physical principles. My brother-in-law Donnie likes to tell the story about how one time Dad faced the usually simple problem of joining two copper pipes, usually done with a small piece called a “couple.” But Dad, remembering his college physics, decided that, in principle, something cold ought to shrink and something hot ought to expand, so he put one of the pipes that he wanted to join into the freezer for several hours, and the other he heated up with a blowtorch. He was determined to prove that you can make a perfect joint with no solder and no couple at all. He was wrong about this, but he at least proved that it could not be done. To Dad the greatest inventions in the world were duct tape, wire, and putty, and he used these to fix nearly everything. It was always hard for me to believe that this man who was such a consummate professional in his dentistry — he followed every rule, he dotted every i, he crossed every t — could be the same man who, at home, was free to roam through his mind as he fixed things. And so we remember him fondly in his jumpsuits — whistling, singing, trying to join pipes with heat and cold. Late in middle age he became a world traveler. He went to Spain and he came back with the story of the most horrible food he’d ever encountered: fried baby eels swimming in olive oil. He went to China when very few Americans had been there. He went to Germany. He went back to Central America. He went to Alaska. But the trip that I remember most fondly was his trip to England when I was living there, and he came with a tour of Wyoming dentists. I naturally assumed that as soon as he got to Oxford, where I was living, that he would leave the tour and let me show him the real England. But no — he was always terrified that someone might try to slip him some spicy food, so he stayed safely with the Wyoming dentists, and he lived another 25 years. He was an avid moviegoer, starting in his boyhood. He was an usher in the cinema of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and he had very discriminating taste here in Casper: he would only go to movies that were shown at the Terrace Drive-In. His favorite movie that he saw there was “African Queen,” but even better than that, what he really liked was a short concession-stand commercial that was shown between features. It showed a stereotypical Italian popcorn seller who would say, “Somebody, she’s a craze,” and “Getta yourself some now,” which became Dad’s bywords — whenever he made popcorn, we had to getta ourselves some now. I hope that most of you know my father as a musician. He played the flute for over 70 years, and as recently as a few months ago was still taking lessons. He always thought there was more to learn, more to master He loved the flute so much, he loved music so much. I never entirely understood the depth of his passion for music until he called it his “mission” and his “ministry.” I really do think that that’s what he was put on this earth to do: to play music for us and to bring us to God in that way. He was also active in the Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, and some of you may have fond memories, as I do, of his playing Pooh-Bah in “The Mikado,” and doing the inimitable Pooh-Bah dance, which would be inappropriate for me to do in this setting but you won’t forget it if you ever see it. As recently as a couple years ago he was in a dance band in Arizona called The Resorters, because he was living in a place called The Resort. But it was always back to Catholic music and always back to sacred music. He even began to write songs in the last couple of years. He gave me the great gift of a Catholicism based on music, based on community, based on love. Again and again he would quote the passage from the Bible where Jesus says, “Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, there am I.” Dad believed fervently in community as the vessel of Catholic faith. About eight years ago, he and I wrote a book of his World War II experiences called A Story Like Mine, and I’d like to read a short passage from the ending of the book. He became very deeply engrossed in his Catholic religion after returning from the war. His service years were a great growing-up time for him, a time not so much of disillusionment but reillusionment. He learned that the world that he grown up with in the 1930s was over, and it was time to reconfigure his life. He did that around Catholicism. He writes,
But he wasn’t naïve about this at all. He saw very clearly the hypocrisy of some of the combatants of the Second World War. He wrote,
Nevertheless he firmly believed that returning to real Christian principles — not so much the Christianity of buildings, of politics, of ritual, but the Christianity and Catholicism of communion, and of community — were what could save us all. In the last few months before he died I often read to him, and a book that he loved to hear was The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, written during the fifteenth century. He would always fool me because his eyes would be closed; I was sure that I had read him to sleep, and as I finished each of the short chapters, I would whisper, hoping that he wouldn’t really hear me, “One more?” He would nod, and he would listen to one more, and so we got through the whole book several times. This book was a very great favorite in the late Middle Ages, throughout Christendom in Europe, and it really expresses the kind of Catholic that Dad was, and the kind of Christian faith that he had. I’d like to read a short passage from it:
Dad was never a conceited man, was always humble in his estimate of himself. He was a cheerful, simple, humble, quiet, gentle, faithful, loving man, optimistic to the very last. On his last trip through Casper, the day before he died, when he was taken to the hospice, he didn’t talk about his pain, he didn’t talk about his demise. He talked about what a beautiful day it was, and how it looked like it would get even better. He loved life very much and was very, very reluctant to give it up, as anyone who has known him in the last eight months can attest. But we can thank God that his sufferings are over, and our presence here, gathered together in this way, is proof of what a wonderful, successful life he has led. He gathered us all together in his circle of love. We are all people who loved Paul Fleming, were loved by him, and I think he had an absolutely triumphant life. I thank you all very much for coming.
Michael Fleming Casper, Wyoming June, 2003
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