I know I borrowed the title from Delly Bean, but I couldn't think of a better one.

At 8 p.m. on Sunday I watched Angola take on Portugal over in the common room. It was fun. The game was well played.

But my heart was elsewhere. At that point, it was 1 p.m. back home in Alberta, time for the weekly Sunday hymn sing at Fort Edmonton Park.

Time to say goodbye to Bill.

And I couldn't be there.

I've heard it was lovely. Odd, but lovely - the cast of characters has, of course, changed somewhat since last summer.

It turns out I'm going to wax poetic about Bill, after all, because I think he deserves it.

Bill drove us nuts at times. What 80-something year-old doesn't? They're fixed in their ways, have a preference for certain things to be done in a certain way, feel that because they've always done something they should continue to do it... and although it drives us nuts, they've lived for long enough, they might not have that much time left, so we let them do it without complaining too bitterly.

But Bill can probably best be described through an anecdote.

I don't feel that I got to know him all that well, but we shared music as a bond. All last summer I played the organ at hymn sing - being the only trained pianist on the street, the skill was easily transferred onto the pump organ. Mr. Spaans would lead the singing, although there were a couple of occasions on which he was absent and I had to do that as well. Never have my years of vocal training served me better... Bill had been the organist in the past, so I would often hand over the keyboard to him to play a few hymns each week (arthritis was slowly getting the better of his hands), stand behind him, and join in the singing.

My parents visited the park one day last summer. I think it might have been Highland Gathering... in fact, I'm sure it was. But they spent a lot of time chatting to "a lovely older gentleman in the church." Bill, of course. When they had explained that they were my parents, apparently the praise for me and my musical talent couldn't stop flowing. I've always hated hearing myself praised, and so at the time I was embarrassed.

I guess what threw me for a loop (see last post) on hearing that Bill had passed away was regret. Regret that I'd never thanked him for saying such nice things. Regret that I hadn't listened more carefully to his stories as we sat in Ottewell. Regret that I hadn't gotten to know him better. Regret that I'd taken for granted the closest thing I've had to a grandfather in years (one of mine died before I was born, the other when I was 9, and we never lived close to him, so I didn't see him much). As Kevin said, he loved us all, and I regret that I didn't realize that he was, more or less, a grandfather-figure to all of us, and not just to those with whom he was particularly close (like Stop and Go, or Delly Bean).

And then there was the regret that I couldn't be there on Sunday. I couldn't play the organ or sing one last time, knowing he'd enjoyed it so much. I've never really had a personal reason to use my talents and the one time I did, I couldn't be there.