To view this personal family obituary as a downloadable PDF, click here. FRANK RABEY Jan. 10, 1932-Sept. 26, 2017 GREENVILLE, N.C. — He was both jokester and Depression-era pragmatist. A cut-up, a card. A contrarian of the very first order. He was a lover, above all, of family, including his pets, and of travel, classical music, the …
So after so much of this, for so long, I find myself forced to ask: Is there something about me that simply invites a certain kind of chaos? I went out early tonight to a concert, 18th-century European chamber music on period instruments, at a local gem called The Music House, on 5th Street just …
In the end, this may be my favorite picture ever of my father, dancing here with my mom, my angel, my mother. It says everything you need to know. Everything all of us who knew him should remember. At 9:46 p.m. yesterday, Frank “no middle initial” Rabey, the final child of Slavic immigrants rubbed out …
These last two days: So first my iPhone, essentially free a couple of years ago (accumulated points), yesterday made its death knell clear, ignoring a new Sim card and all factory resets; it’s now a pre-corpse of stumbling WiFi, no calls, no text, no Internet, no Siri and her prudish answers to my naughty questions, …
I took my frail old-girl kitty to the vet’s this morning for scheduled dental x-rays I somehow knew in my gut would be ugly in their revelations. And they were, even more than I had bargained for, absolutely crushing: a mass growing fast up near one eye. I thought she would at least be going …
There is nothing, just nothing they can giveyou, not for this. You’ve set the timethey will arrive with needles, somethingliquid clear and final, andsome sorries, surelyso the suffering will go out But for now, you markthe labored rise of ribs, furfloated into every cornerof your life, there will beso much less to clean, feelyour own breaths, halting there is …
Y’know those commercials for prescription drugs for this or that chronic ailment, ads inevitably ending with an “ask your doctor about,” and then promptly launching into a whole litany of horrors (in some patients, shedding of vital organs may occur, etc.)? Those wretched causative unwanteds, plus my own propensity for reacting negatively to, well, just about …
Never have given half a rip for country music, as country music is today, all truck-lovin’ light-beer bros in over-styled cowboy hats gulping on the last note or two to get it to twang. But Merle Haggard. Now, Merle Haggard. Deeply grateful I once got to interview this raucous gem of a man, by phone, …
The roller-coaster ride of old pets, another dip, another rise. Took my dear old Bug boy in today to our outstanding vet office, East Carolina Veterinary Service, sure in that awful down-in-the-bones way it was over, or the start of over, and even the vet was bracing me for the worst of news. Old boy has …
RIP, great Meadowlark. You inhabit one of my favorite childhood memories. This, from a story I wrote for Mountain Xpress in Asheville, when I was working there back in 2001: An 8-year-old kid gapes from the stands as the great George “Meadowlark” Lemon stomps over courtside to hurl a bucket of water on the ref — …