Heading Home

Given a choice, my mother preferred not to travel. She enjoyed being in new places, visiting family members and taking in the occasional entertainment, but she despised the process of getting from point A to point B. Packing for a trip was agony – so many decisions needed to be made!  Even getting the house cleaned and put in order before leaving created high anxiety, but it had to be done. What if you died on the road? Certainly you wouldn’t want strangers roaming through your bedroom, running their fingers over a dusty night stand and telling one another you were slovenly.

As for those hours in the car, there weren’t enough magazines, knitting projects or books in the world to overcome her impatience. Sometimes she seemed to be thinking, “If only I could close my eyes and discover when I opened them this misery had passed.” Other times, she put her feelings into words: “If I’d known it was going to take this long to get there, I would have stayed home.”

Now and then someone with an inclination to tease would call her “Dorothy”, and everyone understood the reference. She’d just laugh and say,  “If someone gave me a pair of ruby slippers, I’d be out of Oz in a minute. Being able to click my heels and go would make life a whole lot easier.” 

Camping Out In the Cosmos

 

School has ended, summer has arrived and the sudden spill of Sunfish, Optis and Lasers onto the water means it’s sailing camp time on Clear Lake. 

Watching from my work dock, I have to smile. The older kids arriving for the first week of instruction look – and act – like any other group of teens.  They remind me of the skateboarders who congregate in our grocery store parking lots – studies in calculated cool.  To adult eyes their swagger might seem a little too self-aware, a bit overdone, but there’s no mistaking the meaning of the jostling, fist-bumping and sideways glances  that mark their passage through the week. They’re as interested in the social seas that surround them as they are in the water, and they’re learning to navigate both.

The Raising Up of Dale T

 

No one really knew how Dirty Dale got his name.  Gladys, who owned a cafe down the street and had plenty of opportunity to watch the locals in action, insisted it came from his good-natured willingness to pursue every female in sight, no matter how oblivious, uninterested or flat opposed to being pursued she might be.  A few of the prissier live-aboards in his marina claimed he was “dirty” Dale because he rarely made his way to the bathhouse for a shower. That wasn’t true. He trotted off with his towels and shaving kit on a daily basis just like everyone else.  An untrimmed, scruffy beard and fly-away hair did give him an unkempt appearance and it was a fact you could identify his current projects by the kind of grease or oil smudged across his tees, but that was true of everyone. All things considered, it seemed unlikely lack of personal hygiene was the genesis of his name.

The Poured-Out Heart

Slender and freckle-faced, as plain as his name, my first true love preferred Western shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons and fancy piping, even though he mostly wore soft, plaid flannels or, in warmer weather, crisp cotton with just a hint of his mother’s starch.  On the first day of fourth grade, when alphabetical luck decreed we sit next to one another in Library Class, he happened to be wearing a blue-and-white check with a single pocket and short sleeves.  Forever after, it was my favorite.

As so often happens, proximity bred friendship. When the librarian told us it was time to share books and read to one another, I read with Tim.  Encouraged to search for shelved books by Dewey decimal number, we searched together.  Entrusted with the responsibility of choosing our own book report partners, we chose each other.

The Tombstone Follies

 

Since beginning to blog, I’ve become a bit of a child again: grasping and sometimes greedy, ranging through the aisles of the cyber-store pulling down sites, programs and possibilities like so many penny candies.  With my basket already full of images and words to play with, I want more.   I want to design my own site.  I want to learn html and master CSS.  I want to frame images, create smooth, fluorescent lime-green buttons and carve out text like so many Roman columns.   I’ve seen people chrome-plate cherries, make ordinary ponds shine with shimmering light and turn Tom Cruise into an alien.  I want to do those things, too - just for fun.

Luckily, there’s a site where I can learn to do all those things: Worth1000.   I affectionately call it ”Photoshop Run Amok”.  Whether you’re ready to learn, drool in the presence of striking images and photographs or simply are curious about what’s out there, it’s a terrific site, capable of dissolving hours of time.

Roaming around the site one evening,  I came upon one of the funniest images I’ve ever seen.   Created by Andrea Guglielmi for the Celebrity Tombstones contest, it’s entitled “Pacman”.   Even non-gamers recognize PacMan, and I burst into laughter at the visual joke: 

After the first giggles had passed, I kept laughing because the image recalled another, quite real cemetery experience that reduced an entire carload of mourners to near-hysteria, the kind of laughter that leaves you  unable to breathe, with tears running down your face. 

At the funeral of a friend, I was invited to join some family members on the trip to the gravesite.  We chatted and reminisced as we drove through quiet San Antonio neighborhoods, until we reached the cemetery entrance.  As the driver paused at the gate, six people saw the sign at the same time:  NO PLANTING WITHOUT PERMISSION.  Surely the administrators meant only to discourage unofficial geraniums and mismatched petunias, but their ill-considered phrase couldn’t have been funnier, even given the circumstance.  As we gasped for air, the driver grinned and said, “Don’t worry about it.  Happens to everyone.”

Certainly death is a serious matter, but more often than we admit it also can be an occasion for high hilarity.  When a dear friend in Salt Lake City was dying of cancer, she talked freely about her wish to be cremated.  She seemed to enjoy pondering possibilities for distributing her remains but one day, apropos of nothing, she announced, ”Whatever you do, don’t sprinkle me over water.”  She loved the water, but to our great amusement and her own laughing chagrin, she admitted her reluctance was grounded in the fact she couldn’t swim.

A few years later, cremation again became the subject of conversation at a party in Houston, when a group of friends began talking about cremation vs. burial.  Eventually, the talk turned to tombstones.  One of the men asked, “Well, if you were buried, what would you want your epitaph to be?”

We sat and pondered the question through another bottle of wine, until an entomologist with the Texas Department of Agriculture suddenly erupted in great peals of laughter.  “I know!”, she exclaimed.  “I know exactly what I want on my tombstone – You Can’t Bug Me Any More !”

It was the beginning of a delicious evening.  After a little more time and a little more wine, a couple who both enjoyed successful careers in television news designed a double tombstone with two matching, blank television screens and the words, Stay Tuned – We’ll Be Right Back.

A woman whose husband died only a month after abandoning her for another woman giggled and giggled before gaining the courage to admit she wanted her stone to say, Buried Single, But We’re Double Dead.  She enjoyed the sentiment so much she took the next step and created a full parody of Barbara Mandrell’s song.  I hear she still sings it now and then, under the right circumstances.

I wasn’t varnishing boats at the time, but now that the career change has been made, there’s no question what would be on my own tombstone: a bucket, a brush and the phrase, She Varnished From Our Sight. 

Every now and then I think of those epitaphs, and I’m just as amused.  They don’t seem improper, twisted or frivolous. They’re funny; they help to put a human face on an inescapable reality: the experience of death.  According to family legend, my Great-Aunt Rilla used to travel out to the cemetery to gaze on her own little plot of ground.  Questioned about it, she’d dismiss the impertinent soul with a wave of her hand and one of her favorite malapropisms: Tempus Fidgits.

The truth, of course, is that time flows its inexorable, mysterious way while we are the ones who fidget, unwilling to accept either its course or our own inevitable end.  As people knew centuries ago and as Annie Dillard so eloquently writes today, the memento mori – a reminder of death in the midst of life – focuses the attention and clears the eye, enabling us to accept the world and our place in it with a degree of realism and serenity.

Dillard’s essay in the November, 1973 Atlantic, later included as a part of her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, makes the point in a manner both eloquent and true:  

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.” This is what we know. The rest is gravy.

 

Copyright © 2008 Linda L. Leinen.   All rights reserved.

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