Who Is Bill?

Here stands Bill.

To his Grandpa Swaim, he was Sugar Manny. To his Uncle Jim, he was Bilious Bill. To most of those who knew him in his youth, he was a good kid most of the time. (After he was grown, he commented more than once that being chicken can get a kid a lot of credit for being good.)

To most of those same people, he was Billy for his first fifteen or sixteen years. After that, he was usually just Bill; though his driver’s license always listed him as William Henry Dearmore, Jr.

As a child, he thought he was Billy Boy. “‘Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Oh, where have you been, Charming Billy?’ ‘I have been to seek a wife. She’s the darling of my life. She’s a young thing and cannot leave her mother.’”

As a young man seeking knowledge and understanding (and fortune, of course), he was probably more like Little Willie.

“Little Willie from his mirror
Licked the mercury right off,
Thinking in his childish error
It would cure the whooping cough.

“At his funeral his mother
Smartly said to Mrs. Brown,
‘Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down.” - (Author unknown, but it came from Bill's high school chemistry class)

But Bill was more careful. (Chicken, actually. Remember?) And maybe a little bit luckier. And Bill experimented more with thoughts than with things, anyway. Partly because of some of his thoughts, a few people said he was a “space cadet,” a “space nut,” or just a “nutcase.” More than once he was said to be “way far out.”

To some, he was Wild Bill; but everybody knew he wasn’t really wild.

He always wanted to be a “professional explainer,” as Isaac Asimov described himself. But he had too little of Asimov’s talent or personality or drive. Or brains.

When he wasn’t trying to be an Asimov, he wanted to be an Albert Einstein, a Linus Pauling, a Paul Harvey, or a Neil Armstrong. But Bill was just Bill.

Bill was probably reasonably smart. At least, he usually thought so. But he seldom if ever thought of himself as wise. He was doubtful there was any great amount of wisdom in the world.

Occasionally someone thought he was a “know it all,” but he always understood that he knew very little of what there was to learn. However, just because he could never know everything — and he knew he couldn’t — he seldom let that stop him from trying. He believed one’s mental reach should exceed his grasp. “To try and fail to learn is far less failure than failure to try,” he said.

Sometimes when the question of knowledge arose, he said he knew a little bit about a lot of things, but not enough about anything to be considered an expert. In his late forties and fifties, though, he might have finally learned enough about personal computer use to be considered an expert by some. Until Windows came along and changed everything.

Bill was a dreamer. He wanted to vacation on the moon and Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He wanted to visit the Antarctic and domed cities on the ocean’s floor. He wanted to fly with little wings on his arms in the microgravity near the center of a giant space station.

He wanted to see poverty and disease wiped out by good and capable people using advanced technologies and social techniques. He wanted an end to the bigotries and prejudices and other idiocies that cause war and so much suffering.

For many years, Bill hoped to live long enough to experience some of these things for himself; and he probably died still expecting many of his offspring to experience most of them eventually.

Despite his hopes and dreams, Bill was a skeptic. Skepticism, in his opinion, didn’t imply that one should (or even could) refuse to believe anything. On the contrary, he said refusing to believe a thing is as irrational as refusing to question a belief. Neither did he equate skepticism with cynicism, which he considered an attitude problem.

He liked to define a skeptic as one who questions everything that’s important enough to worry about, because he said, “Life poses more questions than answers.”

Bill believed in the scientific method and information generated by it. Not that it was infallible or “perfect”; but he said it had proven itself to be the best tool ever devised for learning about ourselves, our world, and the universe. He considered skepticism an essential part of the scientific method, and said its function was to weed out unworkable and unnecessary ideas. To Bill, the scientific method was a system of gathering data by observation, coming up with one or more ideas about the data, and then weeding out the ideas that don’t work. Which is usually most of them.

Hence the need for skepticism.

He believed in technology, which he thought of as applied scientific information. That is, information learned by the scientific method and used to create something or accomplish a purpose.

He believed in the power of reason and logic, but he doubted that most of us are as reasonable or logical as we like to think. He said that’s probably why we need skepticism, to keep us from believing even more nonsense than we do.

Bill realized that some of his friends and relatives would be convinced he was going to burn in hell for his skepticism. But he was skeptical of that, too; and he fervently hoped they would not grieve unduly about it. He expected to die like Rover, “all over.” He was very skeptical of immortal spirits or souls or “life after death.” He doubted the existence of any hell other than the one that so many people experience every day of their lives. Or any heaven, either.

That’s not to say he wouldn’t like to believe in eternal life in a place of joy and health and prosperity. He just couldn’t find any evidence of it, and it seemed like a pretty far-fetched thing to believe without serious evidence.

Some of the things Bill did believe in were love and affection; joy, pleasure, and fun; peace; friendship; loyalty; honesty and integrity, without which he said civilization could not exist; limited, but extensive, freedom for all, except those few violently dangerous criminals which he thought should usually be locked up for a long time to protect the rest of us from them; and he believed in minding one’s own business.

If this essay seems a little bit one-sided, it is probably because Bill himself wrote it during his fifty-eighth year of life, and then modified it a little bit several times. He tried to write truthfully, but one never sees oneself as others see him.

Nevertheless, when you drive through the hill country of Central Texas, where Bill’s ashes were scattered after his death, and you come upon a patch of bluebonnets that might have been fertilized by his remains, think to yourself, “Here stands Bill. In his first life, he was just plain Bill. But now part of him lives again, as a patch of flowers, making the world more beautiful.”

When you get home, tip a glass of your favorite beverage and drink to your own health and wealth and joy, and those of your fellow beings on earth. Then take care of our world as long as you live, and make it a better place. Take time to enjoy the flowers occasionally, and help keep the living things living.

I originally wrote this about a decade ago to be read at my own funeral. Maybe it will be sometime; so I've tried to keep it more or less current, just in case. But I don't plan to die any time soon if I can help it, so I decided to publish it here for anybody who might be interested.