It was a hot, very hot day in mid-summer, I remember. George's "viewing" was in a Funeral Home up in Ridgefield, just off the main street downtown. The service was simple. Family and friends followed the hearse to the graveyard - the one just past the bend in the main drag as you go north out of Ridgefield.

    There were a lot of new faces. But some old ones, too. "Sarge" was there and Tony-the-Mexican, greyer now. He had his pants on. Of the newer factotums who had followed in my footsteps, even as I had followed those worthies who preceded me, there were a few I knew... "Tinker" a short, wiry little guy who ran a blacksmith shop up at the bend in the road ("Tinker Shop") and who inherited George's great big anvil (I'd give my eye tooth yet to have gotten that - 300 pounder at least). And "The Lugger" or Harry Mills - a local garbage collector and general all round good hand in a fight, at a picnic, or a drinking bout (which latter later did him in, it seems).

    And there were others, some unknown to me. Tinker, the Lugger, Stu, and I were pallbearers I know, along with a couple other of George's "hands".

    We lifted George's coffin from the hearse and started slowly across the grass. It was hot. George was - well, real heavy. The Lugger was hung over, Tinker had a bad leg or something. Stu was gamely holding up his end. I was staggering along up front. The new "hands" were bending their back to it - but it was heavy going that day... The undertaker danced along ahead of us like some kind of Pied Piper indicating where we should walk. Incredibly, to get us on the other side, he routed us on very springy planks right over the open grave itself! The springiness was wholly unexpected - and for just an instant it seemed our burden might escape our grasp and we might all tumble alike into the gaping hole.

    I remember looking down as we crossed and saw our shadows and that of the planks across the sides and bottom of the grave. "Well, what the heck", I thought. "If George could survive that fall out Mom's bow window, he sure ought to be able to survive a little old fall like this to the bottom of his grave.."

    I laughed to myself. Old George would have like that one, I'm sure. We set him down and the minister finished the graveside service. "E pluribus unum," I said under my breath.

    So we buried him there and left him. Left him and cleared out one and all. Mom sold the place, his goods were scattered to the wind - the recycling on twenty year cycles that George said all antiques, collectibles, possessions - and people - go through in this world. He believed that, and I guess I do too, anymore...

    I was to see Chuck one more time. He came to see me one snowy night - riding a motorbike. When he left, I watched him disappear down the street. He had an old poncho on that reached clear to the pavement and completely covered the motorbike. His head stuck out the other end. It looked like a man in a tent running down the highway.

    Last I heard he was setting type in a printshop in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

    I went back to the cemetery once. There was a tiny little stone there. All it said on it was "Sgt. Rhine". I have tried herein to extend that too-short epitaph: we buried a giant that day. His like will come no more.