Z and I had a family reunion of sorts the other day; both hers and mine.
Generally, I’m a little wary of such kinfolk adventures, but we’ve participated in this particular exercise for quite a while now.
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The best thing is, unlike other such family events, there’s no squabbling, no judgment, no sage advice or stealthy, butinski information gathering…for the most part.
No…Z and I just drop by and say our hellos, maybe provide an update of interest like the current baseball standings, or the state of this year’s rhododendrons, and basically do what we have to do.
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By now you may have guessed that this particular family reunion starts out up on the hill, in the little village within a village, otherwise known as St. Mary’s cemetery.
And, also by now, you might understand why there is very little in the way of familial friction…like I said…for the most part.
It’s a Memorial Day tradition that Z and I sort of inherited in that we were the “chosen ones” of our respective families, who accompanied our predecessors to the cemetery every year for the mulching and weeding of gardens, planting of flowers, trimming of bushes and even the spreading of grass seed to fill in the occasional bare patch.
For a kid, the idea of death is somewhat foreign; something relegated to an “alien distant shore” to quote Mr. Springsteen.
“Hey, I’m just getting started…you want me to think about the end already?” to quote 10 year old me.
My first tangible memory of this sort of thing was back in 1964, when I had been selected to serve as an altar boy for the annual Memorial Day Mass conducted right in the cemetery itself, down where the Mausoleum is now, in front of the big monument.
It was a grey, blustery day and my primary function was to hold the pages of the liturgy in place so the priest could read it without jumping from Peter to pay Paul and confusing everybody…or everybody who was actually paying attention. We weren’t far from where a large plot of nuns took their eternal rest, and even in death I could hear their admonishments for me to stand up straight without schlumping my shoulders.
Anyway, as I stood there, back straight, shoulders high, I looked out at all the solemn faces standing in the cold and wondered what the big deal was. What was this all about?
Then the priest kicked my foot and I remembered to turn the page and that was the end of that.
Right after the mass, my dad and I walked up the hill to visit the grave of my Irish grandfather— my dad’s dad—who had died just a month or so before. It was the first time I was seeing the newly installed headstone and I have to admit it kind of shook me a little to see my last name carved into the granite, and then my gramps’s first name, below, with those tell-tale bracketed years that define a lifetime.
And then I began to understand what this was all about.
My dad, being my dad, didn’t come with flowers. Instead he pulled from his jacket pocket a....
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