Why

In other unrelated bank business, the other day I went to set up an appointment to deal with my (now dead) father's accounts, which someone needs to be able to get to to pay off things like the remaining nursing home bill. As I was describing the situation (pretty simple and not anything that will need to go through probate, knock on wood) the manager guy I was talking to asked if my father had life insurance.

I said no, I didn't think so.

He made a face.

I asked Why? since I thought maybe that would complicate things (though I don't see how it should, given it's nothing to do with the bank-related part of his assets). No, he said, but it pained him to see someone die without life insurance, then explained that he used to work in insurance.

I was puzzled by this.

Walking out I realized it never even occurred to me that my father would have taken out a life insurance policy. After all, what is life insurance? It's something you pay money for that will only benefit your family. You know, people that aren't you. Or in my father's case, not him. Why on Earth would he ever spend money on something like that?

Ironically This Post Is Not Directly About Iron

So there was a small pile of my father's stuff we took back from the nursing home; and there, right on the top, was this (I've blurred out both his name and the name of our town):

That's right, the man who turned his acre and a half yard into a junkyard full of rusting cars, rotting lumber, leaking engines, fifty-five gallon drums of parts cleaner, buckets of broken glass, containers of waste oil and dirty gasoline and miscellaneous toxic substances (such as that ancient bottle of muriatic acid Tara and I had to deal with) was on the local Conservation Commission for more than twenty years. And when he retired from that, the town gave him a fucking plaque.

I have two questions. One, what were the town officials thinking when they gave this to him? They had to note the mind-blowing irony of the situation, right? And two, if they genuinely didn't, what the fuck were they smoking? I mean I know this is a small town, but reality is still reality, isn't it? They were otherwise after him to clean up the yard, so it's not like they didn't know. I mean, not like anyone driving past the house wouldn't know.

For my father's part I'm sure he saw no irony in it at all. I'm also quite sure that the reason he was on the Conservation Commission in the first place was not actually out of concern for the environment, but because he was a busybody who wanted to know what other people in town were doing on their property, as the Conservation Commission oversees things like permits and the regulations around wetlands and the like.

He was also on the Soil Board, for that matter, which is very much concerned with the quality of the soil, you know, like whether it might be contaminated with dirty oil, or brake fluid, or gasoline, or transmission fluid, or parts cleaner...