Everyone called Robert ‘Bert’. He hated that name. Ironically, he really liked the name ‘Rob’ but no one would call him that. They didn’t not call him Rob on purpose, they were never being malicious, they just always seemed to already know someone else called Rob who had snagged the nickname “Rob” before he could get his hands on it. It seemed a universal constant of Robert’s life, that wherever he would go, a different Robert had already been.
Even amongst his own family Robert wasn't the first Robert. Robert's father, Robert, had been Robert before him. You might presume that he would go by Rob junior, but his mother and father had decided to go with Bert instead because it would be funny and they were very silly people. The thing about silly people is that they have this uncanny knack for producing very serious children. Bert was no exception.
In Bert's opinion, serious people were the backbone of the world. They were very important and got a lot of serious things done. All of Bert's favourite people were serious people; people he saw on the news or read about in very serious books. Bert knew that for such a serious person like himself he would have to have a very serious purpose and although he didn't let on, he was very excited to find out what it was. Being an only child, but also being the only serious person in his very unserious family, Bert was often left to pick up the scraps when it came to his family.
So when Bert's mother called him up to tell him that his father had died, he knew it would fall to him to make the preparations for the funeral. This was the dilemma that Bert was mulling over today on his way to work. What sort of funeral should he throw for his father? Should it be a dress up party theme? What sorts of games should there be? All the best funerals had games.
He wondered if there should be some sort of domino related theme. After all, his mother had said his father had died in a domino accident. Who had been doing what with dominos and why there was an accident was not explicitly clear to Bert, but it did give him a good idea. The party would be domino themed.
Bert loved funerals; They were always very exciting. and Bert knew that his father’s funeral was going to be especially exciting because his father had achieved a great purpose in his life. There was no reason to fuss over death, in fact quite the opposite; his father had achieved his purpose before his death and so was worth celebrating as they had done what they came onto the earth to do. There didn’t seem to be much cause for unpleasantness, just another reason to celebrate his life and start counting down the days until they can reunite with each other in the Afterlife.
There was actually quite a bit of pressure on Bert. This celebration had to be particularly good because his father had had a fantastic purpose indeed. Bert still remembers the day it happened, his father had told him all about it. He had driven straight home to tell him. He had been a truck driver you see, and one day he was driving down the freeway when suddenly he heard police sirens and loud engines approaching behind him. He looked into his rear-view mirror and saw several police cars speeding after a fancy looking sports car driving well over the speed limit.
He described it as instinct taking over as he lurched the wheel of the truck to the side pulling it horizontally across the entire freeway and blocking any way forward. With nowhere to go the sports car slowed down and stopped in front of the truck. The police pulled up and handcuffed the two men in the car, after some kerfuffle, and congratulated Robert senior on helping them catch these two criminals who had been part of a massive national man hunt after a series of bank heists and murders.
And then, all of a sudden, he started to get a warm sensation. It started in his toes. It moved up through his stomach and up into his brain with this feeling of warm glowing energy that radiated off him in a bright halo shining off him into the sky. And he knew that this was his divine purpose. He was so proud, he was telling people about it for weeks afterwards, and they were always very impressed. "Wow, that's so much better than my purpose" many would say, or, "Gee that's almost as good as mine," others would brag, or, "I hope my purpose is nearly as good as yours!" some would sigh. His father liked to joke that some of the policemen seemed to be a bit short with him, annoyed that it wasn’t their purpose to apprehend the criminals.
Bert was proud of his father, but more than anything, it just increased his excitement for what his own purpose would be. He frequently asked his father how he would know when his purpose had arrived, and his father would always reply, “You’ll know it when it comes.” This was rather useless information in Bert’s opinion, but it didn’t stop him from asking the same question at every opportunity. If a man as silly as his father could have a purpose like that, then someone as serious and important as himself would have a great purpose in store. He couldn't wait to find out.
"Maybe the funeral should have a piñata?" He mused to himself as he continued on his way to work.
His mother’s purpose had been much less unique than his father’s but much more exciting to Bert. Her purpose had been to give birth to Bert. When he was a kid his mum would often try to remind him that lots of parents had Purposeful Children (the name given to children whose parent’s purpose was to have them), so he shouldn’t let it go to his head, but this was with little success. It went so far into his head that it was almost 85% of his personality. But Bert would tell you that he was a very humble person.
Bert pulled into the company car park in his vomit green sedan. The car park belonged to Bert, but it also belonged to an architecture firm that Bert also belonged to. Like most firms of its kind, it mainly involved itself in architecture related things. Bert found himself on this day an architect, as he had on many days before it. He liked to think of it as a daily role to help him ignore the fact that he had had this role for 11 of the 31 years he had been alive. As part of this role, today he would need to partake in an internal company meeting. 97% of these work meetings were useless, the other 3% were also useless but Bert liked to split them up like this in his mind to create the illusion that maybe he wouldn’t regret going. To be honest, Bert would have liked to take the day off and avoid the meeting altogether, but he needed to tell his boss, Miranda, that he wouldn’t be able to work next Friday on account of the funeral.
As Bert walked up the stairs into her office, he wrestled with a complicated dilemma. He needed to phrase his request for leave to throw a party in a way Miranda would not feel like she was invited. It’s not that he didn’t like her but having his boss at his father’s funeral would make it just a little bit harder to relax. “Ah that’s it!” he thought to himself. He had just come up with the perfect way to frame it. He repeated it several times in his head as he walked over to her office and prepared to open his mouth and say all the words in the correct order.
He opened the door and blurted “Hi Miranda! I need to take work off next Friday as I need to plan a private party! Thanks for your understanding, now let’s go and knock out this meeting!”. In Bert’s hurry to remove all the words from his brain and spit them into reality he hadn’t taken full account of the office he was now in, which was empty. Before Bert’s thoughts could accommodate for this new information they were interrupted.
“Oh, hi Bert! Did I hear you say something about a party?”. Miranda had appeared behind Bert like Death might appear behind an unsuspecting old man, only with more pep and cheer. Bert attached some words to other words as quickly as possible.
“Oh, uh yes, I’m having a party next Friday and uh--”
“Oh, that sounds lovely, what’s the occasion?” Miranda interrupted.
Bert could feel himself losing control of this conversation to the invasive powers of Miranda’s delightful positivity. “Oh, it’s my father’s funeral so you see the thing is-”
“Oh of course I will come, that’s so sweet, I’d be honoured to be there. I haven’t been to a good funeral in months, so no pressure,” She joked. “Just message me the time and place and I’ll be there! Now let’s go knock out this meeting!” Miranda decisively concluded.
She led the way towards the conference room and Bert followed glumly behind. He thought about saying something to correct her, but in the time it took for him to decide, he had missed the opportunity for it to even remotely be a part of the same conversation. He resigned himself to Miranda coming to the party.
…..
Despite this slight hiccup, all other party preparations continued without a hitch, so naturally Bert was certain the party would be an utter disaster. As Friday drew nearer he became increasingly concerned about whether the theme had the right amount of blue and if the playlist he had been concocting with empirical testing had just the right amount of bop. If it weren’t for his mother, Delinda, he probably would have gone insane. Luckily, Delinda had reserved all the insanity for herself so there was barely enough left for Bert to have more than two panic attacks. In the wake of Robert’s passing Delinda had really picked up the slack on eccentricity. So much so that Bert could barely notice he was gone. They had both been quite crazy together but now Delinda was doing the work of two people. Her insanity however, was a lot more pleasant than Bert’s and mainly involved eccentric balloon blowing and bursting into weird dances. Between the two of them, they made a surprisingly apt party planning, task-force.
By the time Friday night rolled around, not even Bert could deny that they had put together a decent party. With only an hour until the party began, Bert added the final touches. In the largest exposed wall in his house he placed a sizeable framed photo of his father that his mother had picked out. The portrait was surprisingly heavy, with most of the weight coming from the frame which was made of a bronze-coloured metal extravagantly engraved with swirls and circlets in silver. He trembled under the weight as he heaved it onto the nail in the wall; swing and a miss. He fell to the ground with the frame in hand bookended by a suspicious cracking noise. He examined the glass surface of the portrait. He couldn’t find any imperfections and so decided to ignore the noise. As he stared closely into the face of his father he couldn’t help but notice how similar his father looked to him. He had never really appreciated his similarities due to the twenty-year age gap, but Delinda had picked out a much younger photo of his father, where the similarities were pronounced. They shared a strong sharp jaw-line that stood out compared to their rounded cheekbones above. Their broad squarish frame, supporting a disproportionately large head was always a point of teasing for Bert, which upon reflection was something his father also would have received. He hadn’t talked about it though. Robert had not been one to reflect on any of the sadness in his past, only the happy parts; a point of contrast between them. Another difference was in height. Bert had the height of his mother. In life he had towered over his stockier father. And his eyes were distinctly his mothers. His father had the deep blue eyes of the sea whereas Bert and Delinda had eyes she would describe as ‘burnt umber’ but he would consider ‘brown’. There was also a warmth emanating from the smile of his father that Bert was never able to capture in photos of himself. This was not something he inherited from his mother however, but more of a genetic mutation affecting only Bert. He heaved up the frame again this time managing to notch the string at the back onto the nail. He straightened up the portrait admiring his work. Everything was ready.
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The clock struck seven and naturally no one arrived. Arriving at a party on time was the height of uncool -- Bert knew this -- he had never been to a party on time in his life. This did not stop him from immediately assuming that everyone had forgotten, and no one would come. Luckily for Bert, he only needed to feel like this for another 30 minutes. Guests started arriving, awkwardly at first, progressively with more confidence. Once enough people had arrived for everyone to agree that this was a party worth being at, a collective sigh of relief resonated across the house. The theme seemed to be a great hit, with many people dressing up in domino related costumes. Bert made a note of Miranda’s costume as she came in so he could best avoid her throughout the night. Unfortunately, a domino theme did not leave much room for creativity, and so everyone did end up looking the same. This made it quite hard to spot anyone in the crowd of people at the party, but Bert determinately meandered his way through conversations, making sure his presence was noted. A bit of a conversation here, a lot of a conversation there, a laugh to the left, a joke to the right. Bert was really nailing it, he thought to himself. He handled his host responsibilities in much the same way someone who is quite good at hosting parties might. In fact, the only noticeable difference between Bert and someone quite good at hosting parties was that Bert would quietly congratulate himself after every successful social encounter. He interrupted his congratulatory train of thought as he spotted Clive, an old high school friend, across the party. Clive’s attempt to match the theme had been a white shirt with a hastily coloured in black dot in the centre and some pants that were not quite black, but everyone got the idea.
“Hey Clive, you made it!” Bert called out.
“Bert!” Clive boomed over the crowds of people.
They both instantly regretted this decision as they were still too far away from each other to begin a normal speaking volume conversation. Now they would now be forced to make awkward non-speaking eye contact for the entire duration of them pushing through the crowd. A slightly jovial expression of ‘this is awkward isn’t it’ was the only thing to break up the 15 seconds of unplanned eye contact they now both had to deal with. Bert, slightly more desperate to end this social nightmare, burst through a very serious conversation two of his aunts were having about whether life was a figment of their imagination, and if so, which one of their imaginations was to blame for the most recent Transformers movie.
“So good to see you!”, Bert puffed, slightly out of breath from the social exertion.
“You too! This a great funeral,” Clive slurred, beer in one hand, the remnants of another beer in the other. “Really one of the better ones I’ve been to recently.”
“Oh, what other funerals have you been to recently?” Bert replied.
“Oh, you remember Cindy from Balsawood Secondary, right? She didn’t achieve a purpose, so sad, probably why you haven’t heard about it.” Clive tried his best to sound genuinely sad about this, but truth be told he was enjoying the party too much to be sad at that moment.
“I was pretty close with Cindy, I’m surprised I didn’t get invited.” Bert replied, more confused than disappointed.
“Oh, but Robert… was the one organising it.” Clive hesitantly explained, swaying slightly as he spoke.
“Robin B?” Bert queried.
“No, no, Robby Green.”
“Oooooh yeah, he never really got over that crayon thing, did he?”
“Well can you blame him?” Accused Clive.
“I can certainly try,” Bert huffed.
“Well how have you been?” Clive asked, trying to change the subject as gracefully as the three beers he had already consumed would allow.
“Yeah not bad, not bad, just keeping on, keeping on.” Bert responded, trying to sound like the things he had been keeping on with were even remotely interesting (they were not). “How’s the bank going?”
“Yeah not bad, pay check is definitely good.” Clive sighed.
“Try not to sound too excited, it was only literally your purpose to work there,” Bert mocked.
“My purpose was to pass the interview, not to enjoy the job. Not even really to be good at it, but try telling that to the company, they keep promoting me for every little thing because they think it must be my destiny to save the company or something. Won’t listen to reason but I’m not complaining.”
“Well, are you?” Questioned Bert.
“Am I what?”
“Saving the company?” He continued.
“Little bit, but it’s a fluke really. I just keep telling people to do their jobs better and they are.” Clive sighed. “Oh shit, Owen’s coming this way. I need to get out of here. He’s just come back from Italy and won’t shut up about it. Says he found God there. Full of shit if you ask me, God hasn’t been sighted in Europe for a century. ” Clive rolled his eyes, scoffing contemptuously. And with that, Clive disappeared into a sea of black and white slightly better domino costumes.
In his place Owen materialised, rising out of the crowd like a cake requiring self-rising flour rises in the oven when the cook accidentally put in regular flour. Owen was not very tall. “Bert, just the man I was hoping to see!” Chirped Owen.
“Well, you’re in luck. You’re in my house. I would say the odds were very much stacked in your favour,” Bert remarked.
“I have the most extraordinary tale to tell you about Europe.”
After one excruciatingly ordinary tale, Bert was finally saved by the ting of glass, signifying speeches.
“You’re right, that was an exceptionally ordinary tale,” Bert remarked as he rushed off, slightly annoyed that this interruption couldn’t have come at any point in the previous 20 minutes. Owen was left with a slightly confused expression as he tried to figure out if he had just been insulted or not.
The crowd gathered around the death cake, designed to look as much like the accident that killed Bert’s father as possible. The cake sat beneath the portrait of his father, which appeared to look out to the crowd. Bert stood beside the portrait and waited the appropriate amount of time for people to settle down and pay attention. He then waited a little bit longer, until the passive aggressive members of the audience heroically shushed those still making noise. A sense of calm rested on Bert as he began his speech.
“My Father,” Bert paused as he looked over the crowd, “was a great man. You might have known him as Rob, Robbo or Bob, but never Bert.” This was met by chuckles across the crowd. “I knew him as Dad. We were always quite different from one another. Where I was restrained, he was boisterous. Where I was reasonable, he was weird, and while I was working, he was getting himself killed with dominoes.” This was followed by another set of laughs. “Honestly we should have all seen this coming.”
“Now some of you might have heard this story before, but the story that encapsulates Dad best is the time we went to Paris together. Mum had been to Paris earlier in her life and had some money stolen right out of her purse by a busker. So Dad and I were taking a train into Paris and telling ourselves ‘there’s no way we’re going to get swindled, we’ve learnt from Mum’s mistakes. We’ll keep our wallets in our front pockets and keep nothing valuable in our backpacks. We’re too smart for this.’ We then walk up to the ticket vendor and a man in black clothes asks us if we wanted help. He had a card that made the machine do a beep at just the right tone to sound completely official. We look at each other and conclude this man is surely of good character and hand him one hundred euros to purchase our three-day passes for the trains. He prints us off two ‘passes’ and we go through the ticket machine. The tickets work. We’re beaming at each other like complete morons, successfully having navigated the bustling Paris train station.” Bert walked around the cake as he spoke, gliding his eyes over the crowd.
“We go to our hotel, put our bags in our rooms and decide to head out and see what Paris has to offer. We put our tickets through the machine and they don’t work. That was odd. They worked before. This machine must be acting up. So, we go over to the counter to tell them their machine is broken. The counter lady looks at us, looks at our tickets and gives out a noise I can only describe as the exact halfway point between a depressed sigh and a hysterical snicker. It turns out the three-days passes we had bought for one hundred euros were one trip tickets worth fifty cents. Despite all our confidence and warning, we had been swindled by literally the very first person we spoke to in Paris, and stupidly handed him half our money. We never saw the man again, although the lady was nice enough to give these two stupid foreigners some sympathetic chocolates.” Bert paused for laughter. “Anyways… I’ll stop making jokes at his expense while he’s not here to defend himself.” Bert paused for laughter before continuing.
“Whilst I was fuming and cursing that this man had managed to outwit us, Dad was calm and collected, and just laughed at himself. I think that really sums up who he was: just a silly man with nothing but laughter in his heart.” Bert looked over to his father’s photo and took a pause before continuing.
“For all his weird and wacky quirks, he was a great dad, and he taught me half of everything I know. The other half obviously goes out to Mum, whose continuing high spirits are an inspiration to us all. But of course, it’s hard to be sad when he had such an amazing purpose. With a purpose like his, I’m sure he’s reserved himself a truck sized seat in the Afterlife, which will still be less than he deserves.”, This was followed by murmurs of agreement in the crowd. “I hope to one day achieve a purpose as grand as his and give him something to smile about.” Bert’s voice faltered, as he spoke. He knew his father’s purpose was never going to be enough for him which was transparent to everyone watching. There was a pause, and the crowd was silent. “…and then I’ll go off and die extraordinarily enough to put him to shame.” With this he regained the crowd as they all cheered in laughter. Bert handed the microphone to his mother. He receded into the crowd like the hairline of an American congressman might recede under the pressures of political life.
With speeches done, Bert was free to enjoy the party and let loose. He switched the music over to the post-speeches bops and grabbed a beer. Clive found him and dragged him to the dance floor against any rational advice and all of Bert’s pre-prepared objections. The party was a success and Bert was now free to relax just enough to bask in it.