It’s so easy to forget my place. Oh, yes, you know full well that I am uppity and contrary by nature and will drag my heels at the slightest hint of insistence that I should do a particular thing or be a particular way, even if by the pseudo-polite stealth of passive-aggression. I’m just not that naturally Appropriate. A broad, rather than a lady.
I am well enough educated and naturally prissy enough to know the difference. On top of that, I’m smart and cultured and experienced enough to know a whole slew of ways in which I could and possibly should be a better person. I’m also self-aware and honest enough to recognize that the vast majority of those things are just never gonna happen. What you see is mostly what you get, now and forevermore.
But I’m an optimist, presumably quite the cockeyed one indeed.
So while I have openly confessed to you my many excessive loves–gastronomic outrageousness, all things intense and overblown in color and form and bejeweled wildness, baroque language, hardware store binges–I still believe in my own willfully naive way that I might moderate my urges when absolutely necessary. It’s in this hope, however vain or misguided, that I think I might at least periodically overcome my natural state of inertia, of fixity so granite-like on this planet earth that the mere thought of exercise tends to cause me hyperventilation and require smelling salts.
Yesterday, the sun smiled brilliance on me at such an opportune juncture that I broke stasis. The perfect confluence of a gloriously blue-sky cool day with a lunch date with friends a manageable distance away conspired to lure me upright from my characteristic hunched position at the desk and right out into the world.
How quickly one forgets that said world is rather alluring and full of wonders! How quickly I forget that, along with whatever position(s) I occupy in the world of my narrow influence and contact, I also live in the beautiful, messy, unpredictable, constantly shifting world that is my neighborhood, this town, this part of an entire planet.
The whole walk wasn’t necessarily impressive in and of itself. Recent longed-for and welcome rains have left the Texas clay in many areas (lacking sidewalks) converted to rust-colored mucilage, so I spent more of my focus on not being sucked ankle-deep or doing a banana-peel slide in those spots than on looking around me with interest. Fortunately, most of those zones are alongside the duller and dirtier of the main roads, where there mightn’t be much more than an onrush of traffic to engage the senses anyway. But in about seven miles round trip there’s a whole lot to awaken those dormant senses, too, and to remind me that while the sedentary state may have become my default position it isn’t necessarily the best or even the most desirable one.
Yesterday I saw the sun again, really saw it; felt it brush my cheek like a tender hand. Felt the breeze tug the hem of my coat and run its fingers sloppily through my hair. I heard birds whistling and chattering in their treetop congregations. Saw the wintry silver seed-heads of prairie grasses blink their brightness on-off, on-off as they swayed in and out of shade, and trees whose leaves have finally burnished to the exact same shade of red as the bricks on the facade behind them.
And I stopped partway home to have a walk through the cemetery, where I chanced on the headstone of a soldier killed at Pearl Harbor to remind me that it was the very anniversary of the attack that left him and many others dead and launched the US fully into World War II and the loss of millions more. The cemetery is old enough to serve as resting place too for a generation whose family plots often contain two, three, four children’s graves, as many in those days died in infancy or barely beyond youth. There are graves for those who lived long and fully, too. The thing is, I was the only person in this particular cemetery at the moment that wasn’t dead.
Which pleases me a great deal, I’ll tell you.
And it was an incredibly fitting reminder to me that while I was busy patting myself on the back over having been such an outstanding and exemplary being as to take a measly fair-weather walk, I too will join the hordes of the dead soon enough. So I’d jolly well better get out and about in this wide wonder of a world a whole lot more if I want to see the ravens tumble and leap among the tombstones, smell chimney smoke as it drifts between the sweet gums and cedars, and see that twenty-four-karat sun glittering in the enamel-blue sky like there’s no tomorrow. There can’t be an endless number of tomorrows, to be sure.
Death comes to us all, sooner or later. In case I needed a reminder, I came across this grave of a young lady who died on her own twenty-eighth birthday. A birthday I happen to share. The End!
Art-Colored Glasses 
What a coincidence that you should have the same birthday as the woman who died on her 28th! And speaking of synchronicity, as you were the only person in “your” cemetery on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I think I was the only person in the one I wrote about on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (which I described, and which like your post today showed children’s graves, and which you commented on at http://portraitsofwildflowers.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/a-one-day-departure). As you say here, “There can’t be an endless number of tomorrows,” so let’s do our best to appreciate and make use of the ones we still have.
Hear, hear.
One of our closest friends was a fourth-of-July baby too, so it has a special resonance as a birthday here, a perspective that makes it somehow that much more powerful to think of the nation’s birthday.
Gods finger touched him and he slept. That is so STRONG! I have no more words.. c
There *is* something potent in the image of a single slight touch setting one free to be utterly at peace. The most concise expression I’ve seen of the whole “welcome-to-heaven” transaction. Quite sweet.
I like the idea that ‘what you see is what you get’ – no masks, not fronts no sides. Your walk and commune with nature sounds good. Ii is sobering to remember that death comes to us all.
Sobering, yes, yet somehow very freeing; it says to me, Live life on your own terms and the way you need to live it–we’ll all end up the same in the end!
Know thyself. My grandmother always repeated these words to me. Know our limitations, but know our capabilities and strive for those. The beginning of your post, reminded me of her advice. That’s why I don’t accept overnight guests. I might kill them (kidding, just kidding) or at least drive them away. I am so glad you got out into the world for a breath of fresh air.
Me too, Geni! Nothing like even a momentary breather to help me readjust my frame of self-reference. (Because it IS all about me!! 😉 )
I will blog about this one day… but I travelled to Lethbridge with my daughter (she had a swim meet) and was determined to locate my grandmother’s gravesite. I went to the wrong cemetery and when I found the right one it wasn’t anything like my “memory” of it. Strange, because now I think it was a dream that I was recalling, not the actual memory of being there. In any event, the next day I finally located the correct cemetery, that day happened to be April 1st … and when I read her gravestone, I discovered that it was also the date of her birth.. it felt so serendipitous to be there on what would have been her birthday… It was a real gift.
What a lovely serendipity indeed! Mine in that vein was discovering that I lived rather near the cemetery where my late (died before I was born) uncle was buried and that my aunt who had never felt able to visit her husband’s grave in a quarter century was willing to let me take her there. It was a really sweet time. Cemeteries are just full of possibility: intriguing, that!
How wonderful that you were able to help her visit her husband’s grave.. that is so touching xo
I just felt very privileged, as you would imagine.
How strange to see those dates on the tombstone of the young woman who died on her birthday. Those things happen, but it still leaps out at me more because of those dates. And how in the world did people get through the grief of losing children to disease in the 1800’s and before? I cannot imagine it.
No, I can’t imagine either, Dennis. It’s tough enough losing anyone dear, but one’s own child! I suppose that the only solace (if any) was the commonness of it in those days–there were always others who shared your terrible experience and could help carry you through it somehow. But I also think of my grandmother, who in her nineties still couldn’t keep pictures of her daughter in view, though Janet had died about 70 years before, because the pain was still fresh for her. It’s certainly a cautionary tale for me about living life fully as long as I get to do so!
What a beautifully written and very moving post. I have been tracing my family history and on a recent trip to the UK went to try and track down some ancestors via gravestones. I found a few and it was incredibly emotional to trace some of their lives and losses through dates engraved on a piece of stone. Such losses people experienced…it´s hard to comprehend but does make me appreciate even more what I do have now.
I’m with you, Tanya; I hope I never find out further what it’s like to have massive untimely losses (a handful are more than enough), but I am certainly more attentive to the present good as a result. What a great thing to be able to visit the ancestral graves, isn’t it. I was rather stunned at my visceral reaction when I went to the ones in Norway for the first time.
Isn’t also telling, that someone has recently replaced Miss Grace’s 1928 marker with a modern one? That the family of someone, gone for so long, is still tending to her?
In the empty lot next door to us, there is an old family plot. Four graves, four markers, from the early-to-mid 19th century. I go up and clear it twice a year, pull the weeds, cut back the vines. Hubby asks why I do it…I think it’s because there’s a hilltop cemetary called Canaan in the Arkansas hills, where someone else tends the graves of my kin…
The least I can do is to return the favor.
You know, I had something scratching at the back of my brain and didn’t realize until you said it that it was about that new-old headstone! Yes, it’s intriguing who does and who doesn’t tend or attend graves. The Hispanic headstones in this cemetery were of course all dressed up from Dia de los Muertos visits, which was sweet, but the majority of graves looked like they got nothing beyond mowing for decades on end. Being near a university, the taller markers have of course been decapitated and a few pushed aside or over, but not as much as I might have expected–it was surprising to me that more of the damage was from sheer neglect over time, when it’s a decent old graveyard right in town.
What a beautiful thing you are doing to honor the “family next door”. Maybe I’ll have to start my own “adopt-a-grave” program at this cemetery and work my way through. I think there’s a smaller graveyard a tiny bit closer to our place, even, and am hoping to get a look at that one soon as well.
Interesting and very well written as usual. They certainly had a different attitude to death in the past, I guess they had no choice, particularly infant death, as it was so prevalent. Modern medicine, better nutrition etc. have made the common, rare, thank goodness, but may also have made us less able to cope with loss when it does happen.
Yes, I found even in my [long-ago] youth that a whole lot of people were very squeamish about even mentioning death, let alone *dealing* with it. Being a preacher’s kid, I grew up with ‘who died today’ as a topic of dinner conversation and funerals a part of normal life, so to speak, so it was never quite that touchy. But every death that comes close to home, whether family or friend, does indeed change and challenge us in unexpected ways!
This marks the 3rd time I’ve come back to this post and each time I’ve come away moved but for a different reason. Jokes about my poor reading comprehension aside, this was really beautifully written and I’m sure to come back to it again and again.
You are so kind to say so, John. I always appreciate your reading and comments (jokes included!) greatly.
As I am moving backward through your posts as opposed to the normal forward in an attempt to catch up many days behind, I am struck by amount writing about mortality. And in this very “mortal” month (for me), I am so very aware of how quickly each breath is gone, a life extinguished.
I need to get away from myself my dark December thoughts for a moment or two, so I shall put the lap top down and give the cat a bath. And think about my annual smarmy and oh so smug Christmas missive.