ANDERSON, Ind. —
It all started this way for us. On a warm Memorial Day weekend at a church campground on the shores of Yellow Creek Lake in northern Indiana, our daughter Ruth was having some sort of problem with a plaything of choice just as Phillip Miller walked by.
“Oh no!” she shouted.
Phil turned with a start. “Huh?” he said with a grin. “What’d I do?”
From that time on, Phil was known to our family as “Oh no!”
It was a friendship that would grow over the years between our family and Phil and Sharon and their kids: Darrell, Derick and Dawn.
Nearly every Sunday we’d run into Phil on his way down from the choir loft. Invariably our daughter Sarah would greet him with a hearty, “Oh no!” Flashing his trademark toothy grin, he’d reply, “Oh yes!”
For Phil, that relationship and all others here on Earth came to an abrupt end a couple of weeks ago with his sudden, though not entirely surprising, passing at age 68.
Even less surprising, my reaction on hearing of his homegoing was “Oh no!”
Phil and Sharon married some four years after we did, at a time when interracial unions still raised a few eyebrows. We’ve shared family camping experiences with them and in recent years have sung in the same once-a-month recreational singing group. Their daughter Dawn played on a couple of the church junior volleyball teams I coached during our kids’ growing-up years.
A big, gregarious, outgoing fellow, it never took Phil long to brighten up a room with a story or a joke. Though he wasn’t a high academic achiever, he was something of a technical wizard. And he made sure his kids had the opportunities for higher education he never had. Both of his sons have earned doctorates.
“They get their smarts from Sharon,” he would say with a grin.
He played some football in his younger years, and he was strong as a bull. Once at Yellow Lake, rain had turned the campground into a quagmire, and we feared driving into the mud to hook up our pop-up camper. Phil grabbed the camper’s hitch, pulled it around to the road and hooked it up for us with little help.
In later years he had knee surgery, developed diabetes and had heart surgery. That led to the difficulty that took his life.
Oh no! It will be different without Phil around. No longer will he be singing in the church choir, towering over most of the other basses. He won’t be on the ham radio airwaves or working with the church’s audio equipment. And some of the jocularity will be missing from the other gatherings he frequented.
Instead, by now he probably has joined the heavenly choir and is spending precious time with his parents, brother Milton Miller and sister-in-law Sita as they reminisce over good times in their first life.
Jim Bailey’s column appears on Wednesday. He can be reached by email at jameshenrybailey@earthlink.net.
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