I went to a funeral last week. I don’t want to talk about the details (even though some would be quite interesting to write about) because this isn’t something that’s just about Rory. The rest of the family was there, and I have to respect their privacy (at least until this all comes out in my “unauthorized” biography, written “anonymously,” by me (I would never let my unauthorized, anonymously authored biography be written by anyone other than myself)).

What I learned though, this having been my first, is that a Blyth funeral is really just a party that gets started off on the wrong foot.

My great uncle is gone. My paternal grandfather’s little brother; the father of my first-cousin once-removed, and the grandfather of my first cousin once-removed’s daughter, who happens to be my second-cousin, which makes her the first-cousin once-removed of my father, meaning that my father’s uncle passed away.

That, of course, is just the beginning. The man was related to many other people through other similarly complex nodes on the familial network.

And, as you would expect, there was mourning. There was quite a bit of crying, a bunch of “amens” and stuff like that. The pastor wore a bow-tie - a real one he tied himself - which alone should indicate the import of the event.

The interesting thing about these funerals, though, is that, after you’ve mourned the passing of the deceased, you take a look at who’s left.

At the reception (is that what the after-event party is called for a funeral? or is that just weddings? (funerals and weddings are somehow mixed together in my mind as being more or less the same thing)), I spent a lot of time getting blotto with family members. Cousins, second-cousins, first-cousins once-removed (had about a three hour conversation with one about how U2’s Achtung Baby maps directly to the bible, right down to the relevant passages), and one fantastic relative who had these flippin’ awesome diamond-studded Dolce & Gabbana shades to go along with the rest of her I’m-in-my-60’s-but-ready-to-party outfit. It was sweet.

Mostly, though, I thought about my dad. He’s, like, fat and in really bad shape, doesn’t take care of himself, lives with a cat that vomits all the time (and then eats its own vomit), and I keep freaking out that he’s going to die soon. He’s total stroke/heart-attack material. He’s also lived a long and sordid life. If he did die right now, it would be with the knowledge that, to paraphrase a song Bono wrote for Johnny Cash, “He went out there / To taste and to touch / And to feel as much / As a man can / Before he repents.” Before it properly mapped to father we’d have to get rid of that line about repenting, but it’s close enough. He’s done it all.

When we entered the chapel and sat down in the pew together, him wearing a suit that I think he got from the “free” box at the Goodwill, me dressed head to toe in high-quality Italian casual imports that collectively cost more than most of you make in a year, I was surprised that the pew didn’t just go up in flames. Like God had finally caught my dad, in His own domain, and had His chance to stop this impish sonofabitch from rendering anymore evils unto the world.

You’ve all probably heard the phrase “Jesus died for your sins.” My father once said to me, “Jesus is going to have to die twice before I’m through sinning.”

Anyway, at the reception (if that is indeed what they’re called), sometime after my fifth booze ‘n Coke, I vaguely recall listening as my father’s cousin, son of the deceased, told one of the greater stories of Blyth superiority - one of the reasons why we exist on a separate morale plane from the rest of humanity, and why we are all so effing classy, and, most of all, why, when the revolution comes, we’ll take the role of Plato’s Philosopher Kings without contest.

As an air force brat, my dad lived everywhere when he was growing up: In at least fifty-three states of the Union, England, Japan, and…

…Hawaii.

And, when he was living in Hawaii, he was at that age, and living at that time, when a teenage male grew his hair long and told his “superiors” where they could shove it. He was sixteen and was attending one of the nation’s most prestigious private schools (Punahou, if any of you uneducated slobs have ever heard of it).

There are several conflicting stories to account for why he got kicked out that year. The family members who like to keep things quiet and not paint us out to be a bunch of criminals say that he got kicked out because of his long hair. That’s certainly possible.

I find the other story, the one told by the members of the family who are a little less discreet, to be a bit more likely, which is that some higher-up at the school got a little miffed when my father blew up the water tower with a hand-grenade during ROTC training.

Long story short, within a few days, my father was living on Waikiki beach, sleeping on the sand at night with his surfboard tied to his leg so that nobody could steal it while he rested in a peyote-milkshake induced psychedelic coma (I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in that state – constantly thinking that an orange or something was trying to steal your surfboard while you slept).

What impressed me most, and what makes the Blyths (WITHOUT AN “E” DAMN IT – THERE’S NO BLOODY “E” AT THE END OF “BLYTH” FOR CRYING THE FRIKKIN HELL OUT LOUD* (*unless you’re one of the inferior Blyth(e)s)) the classiest gents in the universe, as I was discussing earlier, doesn’t involve my father’s ability to protect his surfboard from would-be thieves, or his good aim with small explosive devices, but with his unexpected well of panache. For a guy who owned nothing more in life than a surfboard, a rope with which to guard it, and a flowing Jaggerian mane, he could still life live with the discerning palate of a connoisseur of all things fine.

He didn’t have any money, and neither did anybody else he knew. He spent most of his time with his cousin, surfing during the day and doing their psychedelic thing at night, but there was a respite between these activities during which they went into the city to seek nourishment from an establishment of fine repute and good standing.

I don’t know the name of the pizza joint in question, but it was their spot – their overflowing font of replenishing manna.

They never, however, never, ever actually bought a pizza, yet they ate well every night.

They would sit in the corner, left alone because they looked like the kind of filthy people who could give you diseases with names like “leptospirosis” just by making eye contact with them. You’d want to interact with them about as much as you’d want to french-kiss a Portuguese Man o’ War.

And there they would sit, undisturbed, watching families eat and imbibe, spying like the peeping-tom Martians from Wells’ classic tale of spacely horror. They inspected and, with the genetically-imbued discerning eyes of those who can tell Dom from Mumms by the size of the bubbles, made their marks, chose their targets, and waited for the crucial moment to move.

If a family was found to have the requisite levels of sophistication, and if the pizza being eaten was being consumed with the grace of a princess, and if the toppings didn’t offend leur goûts raffinés, then they would walk over after the family had left, sit down, and consume what remained of the pizza.

They did this every night for weeks. But, like the cat who sits beneath a chair and believes itself to be invisible, my father and his cousin were regularly spotted by the manager of the restaurant who, over time, took pity on this dirty, hungry, pizza-scrounging rabble.

In an act of good faith, as a human should help another, the manager collected through the course of one night the leftover pizzas from various tables and, near closing, put them all in a plastic sack.

He then approached my father and his cousin, who were probably in the middle of discussing French symbolist poetry while eating the leftovers of a medium with green peppers and pineapple, and offered them the bag of pizza, saying that they didn’t have to sit around and wait, and that he understood, and that he wanted to help, and that they could just have the leftover pizza without going through the motions of inspecting, waiting, and sneaking.

The Blyth gentlemen paused in their conversation. They put down their napkins, and returned the slices they were eating back to the tin plate whence they came.

My father looked up at the manager, looked down at the bag full of disorganized pizza that could have been the leftovers from anybody, looked back at the manager, and, with his chin high, and the plume of his great spirit arching high off into the heavens, beyond the realm of gods, far beyond where Icarus failed, said, “What are you trying to do? Make us sick?”

And, with that, my father and his cousin left the establishment without finishing their meal, went home hungry, slept on the beach, and never returned.

That’s a Blyth.