(Photo: Gravesite near Edinburgh, Scotland)

It occurs to me that you could probably make a very good guess at somebody’s age by comparing the number of weddings to the number of funerals they’ve attended, in the past year.

There are still several weeks of 2006 to go, and so far I’ve been to one of the former and five of the latter, which is probably a record for me.

But one of the few grudging benefits of getting older, I’ve found, is that you don’t dread funerals nearly as much as when you’re younger and are consistently surprised by them. For most of my life, I assumed that the task of the attendees at a funeral is to say, or do, something that will make the family’s loss seem somehow less profound, and I always came up short (no pun intended) in that regard.

I mentioned this dilemma, in passing, to a friend a couple of years back, who observed that this is a very egotistical way to think. The point of showing up at a funeral or a memorial service, she said, is to remind the bereaved that they’re not alone in their sorrow. Job over. You go home.

It was in this frame of mind that I found myself driving up Highway 269 to Oakman on a recent Wednesday morning, under rain clouds that looked as if they might burst loose at any moment. A lifelong friend’s husband of 20 years had died of a heart attack on Monday, much too young, and there was to be a graveside service only.

The turnoff to the cemetery was a narrow road that coiled up a steep hill, with the colors of autumn displayed in the hollows on both sides. I had misjudged my driving time a little bit, and as I parked and walked up to the edge of the crowd of maybe 70 or 80 people, the ceremony was already starting.

There was no lengthy sermon, just a few opening remarks and a reading of the survivors, and then an invitation for any friends or neighbors of Bob, to step forward and say a few words if they wished.

A handful of mostly older men did, and as the comments drew to a close, I realized something. Each man had probably spoken for less than three minutes, in voices whose volume was respectful but exactly loud enough to be heard among the gathered crowd and no farther. Moreover, each of the comments was not some disjointed, rambling remembrance but a real story, a story with a point to it, that made us either laugh or cry.

It was at that point that I thought: These are my people.

We Scots-Irish have the reputation of being a cantankerous lot. And Lord knows, most of us have enough genetic personality flaws to write a psychology textbook about. But when it comes to telling stories, we don’t have to take a back seat to anybody alive.

It occurred to me that I was not thankful enough for that heritage, that gift. And that I’m not thankful enough, often enough, for the great good fortune and privilege to be able to do it for a living.

The rain kept holding off. I didn’t know that the best part of the service was yet to come.

After the comments were finished, a man who looked a little bit like my father, if he had lived to that age, stepped out from the crowd. The man said that he apologized for not being as good with words as the other speakers had been, but that if it was all right with everybody, he wanted to sing just one verse of a song instead.

He cleared his throat and began:

“Farewell, vain world, I’m going home...”

The song has long been my favorite Sacred Harp hymn. It says everything important about death in a few dozen graceful words. I’d heard it sung many times by congregations, but never by just one person before, and it was like hearing the song for the first time.

The musical notes that comprise Sacred Harp compositions are as solid as the wide slabs of cut stone that are used for making steps up and down a dirt hillside, and the notes of this gentleman’s singing let me walk, in my mind, to a place I had been only once before in my life: the place my family came from.

It’s been some 20 years now since I walked down a street in Glasgow, Scotland, weary and homesick from a too-long business trip to nearby England. It was lunchtime, and the scent from a tiny storefront cafe drew me in.

Sitting at a table there, it dawned on me that I was 4,000 miles from Alabama and yet the smells were exactly the same as my grandmother’s kitchen. Not only that, but the waitress spoke to me in the voice of my great-aunt, and the conversations at the surrounding tables were the same tone and pitch as if my grandparents had been multiplied and spaced around the room.

I’m sure some of the customers wondered, when I was gone, why a strange young guy would sit there eating the best shepherd’s pie in the world and crying as if his best friend had died. But there I was.

And there I was, Wednesday morning, driving home from Oakman, changed once more. I was all the way to the fishing camps on the Warrior River before the rain showers finally came, and my one regret was that I had not sought out the man who sang the one short verse, and shook his hand and asked if I could make a good digital recording sometime of him singing the song all the way through, so that I could give a copy to my granddaughter. And she could give one to hers, and so on.

In case any of us ever need to be reminded of where we come from.