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YESTERDAY I WENT TO CHURCH TO HELP SERVE A MEAL that followed a funeral service. I was inclined to believe that the service, as well as the meal, was going to be a rather small affair.

After all, there would be no parents of the deceased in attendance. No spouse, siblings or siblings-in-law. No children, grandchildren or any other direct or indirect descendant. Nor were any of Elizabeth's life-long friends going to be paying their respects. I can see you pondering this dearth of mourners, Dear Reader. Well, consider these few facts: Roosevelt was president when this woman was born--and I'm talking Theo here, not FDR. And, speaking of earthquakes (which I wasn't at the moment, but everyone else seems to be, so I will): Her life was bookmarked by catastrophic ones. The deceased was an infant when the world was abuzz with the San Francisco earthquake and ensuing great fire. Oh, and here's one more thing: Had she set sail on the Titanic, she'd have died as a six-year-old, cutting her life short by ninety-eight years! What I'm trying to say is that she was old--quite old. And she'd had no children. You can understand, can't you, Dear Reader, my assumption that the crowd might be slim.

Therefore, it's fortunate that I was not the one who was making the food purchases and setting up the tables and brewing the coffee. The fellow church member whom I was assisting had done all of this (well, she didn't set up the tables, but she had done all of the planning). There was a nephew who had given an estimate of 'less than one hundred' attendees. Instead of prefixing that with 'far,' she set the 'prepare for' count at ninety.


She had baked one hundred cupcakes (to be on the safe side) and cut up lots and lots of celery; she purchased big tubs of macaroni salad and platters of meat and cheese, bags of potato chips and baby carrots, jars of pickles and olives and applesauce, eight dozen freshly-baked rolls. Then-- no small job in itself--she transported all of this to the church. (You can see--she did most of the work.)

And then I arrived. She was slicing the rolls. This is going to be too much food! I thought. Poor Marie. She did all of this work, and there's going to be so much left over!




But I set to work and helped to ready it all for serving.
We filled relish trays, made up bowls full of pickles. We stacked rolls and filled trays with cupcakes. We put the macaroni salad and the applesauce into bowls.

And then the service got underway. We could hear it from the kitchen where we worked. I noticed the singing sounded rather robust for the tiny group that I pictured in the sanctuary.



I went and sneaked a peek and--wow--when I counted the heads there were one-hundred-ten! There were many church members, and nieces and nephews (I guessed). My goodness, I thought, What a tribute! One for every year of Elizabeth's life and a few to spare!

I scurried back to the kitchen with the news. Dear me, would we have enough food?

Not to worry--I was certain (uh, somewhat certain, or at least pretty sure...well, it seemed possible) not everyone would stay for the meal. And so it was.

We served eighty-eight people.





(Not one cupcake left over!)
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