Cindy Bowe

LtoR: Cindy Bowe, Arta Johnson

Cindy Bowe dropped by to visit after work on Thursday.

She asked me to give her the exact house number of my place since she thought the general shape of the community she once knew might have changed.

I was so excited about having her come that I walked up and down my street, partially for the exercise it would give me, but partially so that even if she missed the house address she would see me.

I wanted to know about her dad’s funeral, and she had brought a programme from it. The front of the programme had Kay Crabtree sitting on a  Harley Davidson motorbike.  The large caption underneath  the picture said “It’s been a hell of a ride.”  The motorbike was important to Kay.  He also wanted to have an image of the bike on his headstone. His kids brought him a picture of how it would look and he had them fix the picture of the motorbike:  too much like one of the Japanese motorbikes and not enough like a Harley.

Kay didn’t want a funeral at all. Not to say that he wanted to live rather than pass away. He accepted that he was dying; he just didn’t want the funeral to occur in the church of his birth, if there had to be one at all.  So it was held in the funeral home. His daughter, Melanie, talked. His sons talked. Curtiss Pilling read a poem he had written about Kay Crabtree.  There were a few reminiscences from an open mike portion of the programme and then it was over.

Another life, well lived.

Kay knew he was sick with something in February, so he and his wife, Kathy, came back from St. George to Alberta.

Kay got weaker and weaker, until he finally couldn’t even eat fries from the local hamburger joint, nor even drink milk. A wheelchair when he got weak, finally in bed and then he passed away before the end of March.

Bill lives in Airdrie; Tom lives in Utah. Both men came home to see their dad. Melanie is a nurse and took care of him in his condo in Cardston for that final 6 weeks. And Cindy down from Calgary on the weekends to see him. She had planned to take him on one last trip out to the Shuswap and said that they were going to drop in on us. What a meeting that would have been.

Cindy and I talked for 3 hours, not moving even a muscle --me, all the time fearing that the meeting would end before I heard her stories.

 Now I have promised her that I would write a few memories about Kay for her and in return she will let me do some reading that I have been looking forward to. I don’t know what I can craft about his very interesting life which she doesn't already know. Some writing is hard to do.

Arta

PS Cindy and I asked each other a lot of questions.  One I forgot to ask her is, on Kay's death, who is it that took the fabulous collection of books on Mormon history that he owned.  For some reason, I was just out looking at the Juanita Brooks' Mountain Meadow Massacre and I wondered idly who has Kay's copy of that and did he get it autographed when he went to visit Brooks.