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January 14 Through Her Eyes“I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.”
~ Paul McCartney
“Life isn't weird: it's just the people in it.”
~ Stephen Wright
~ Tom Robbins
My brother challenged me a few weeks back to what appears to me as a bloggers version of chain mail. You know what I mean; you get an email with some message that states that if you send this to 5, 10 or 100 friends within the next 10 minutes you will have amazing luck, your greatest wish will come true, you will get a million dollars or you will get a big penis BUT, if you don’t forward it off in the prescribed time period, your daughter will marry a NASCAR fan with two front teeth, who has several smelly hound dogs that live under the front porch and a family tree that more resembles a telephone pole (and you will get a small penis). I usually just file this stuff away under: ‘Delete’ which is a very useful folder that I put away the items that I will perpetually get to tomorrow.
The challenge was this: to write six weird things about yourself and then to ‘tag’ six other bloggers to do the same. Now I am new to this ‘blogging’ thing and I don't know six other bloggers and even if I did, I'm not in the practice of doing stuff like this even if there is no prize or curse involved. My brother is not in the habit of sending me crap like the afore mentioned Chain Mails and the idea intrigued me, so in my response back I said that I would do it, but I've decided instead to focus on it as a series of stories to describe myself to all .5 of my readers and not to make it a task for someone with a small penis to have to pass on down the line.
But right out of the gate I was faced with a problem; list ONLY six things that were weird about me. It would have been easier for me to list six things that were NOT weird about me. So after careful thought and a couple of beers in me, I present to you the nominees (and winners) for the ‘Six Things That Are Weird About Me’ category. Listed in descending order is ‘What Is Weird About Me Number 6’:
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
Well in actuality I see and hear dead people, which probably explains it even less and hence the following explanation. What I do in the wild is called ‘Graving’ which is an individual that possesses little social skills who likes to wander the boneyards and catalogs, be it by notation or photographically, the headstones of those filed away in these libraries of life. This information is then uploaded to a database that can be used by people who are tracing their genealogy and the like. In the olden days they used to call this ‘transcribing a cemetery’ where usually a person usually linked to a church or other institution would for posterity sake go around and write down the information that each and every grave stone listed. This information was usually given to the affiliated church or historical society for record to have on hand for the time that the stone was no longer readable. Today it is called ‘Get a Life’. However, this information still can be a diamond for those researching their past but unable to physically visit the last corporeal vestige of a life no longer living and before you sit there and mark my words with “what sappy dribble” I ask you this; why is it that we all go out to cemeteries to acknowledge a loved one who has died, to stand by a stone and grave to remember the person with reflection and flowers. We could easily just remember the person where we are this moment and save ourselves a whole lot of travel time, but there is something in standing beside a grave and speaking to the person as if they were just sitting next to you (and don’t lie, I saw you doing it yourself this past Thursday!). So you see there is great value to what I do and it all stems from something out of my deep dark past.
Creepy kid with a mission:
My father grew up in a small Pennsylvania mining town in a house that had on either end of the street a cemetery. When I was a kid we would go out to see our aunt and her family who lived (and still do) in the house that has been in my family since before my grandmother was born. My dad and I would always set out on a cemetery safari where he would regale me with tales of this one and that one or just tell stories of when he was my age playing in and around the graveyard. His accounts of historical fact were always more entertaining than the actual facts, which were usually boring and as dry as the bones resting mere feet below us. I always felt a connection when traveling through these quiet places, not that I could actually see or hear the dead, but that I could feel the history of them and could somehow, for a brief moment, glimpse into who they were by the dash between ‘Born’ and ‘Died’. This was especially true of those who swung in the branches of our family tree long before me. Was I like them in anyway? What were their thoughts and feelings and desires? Did they ever wonder who I would be as they gazed into their own children’s eyes and imagine into what eyes they in turn would gaze into? Were they good, bad, tall, short, sad, happy, artistic, loving ... did they acknowledge vanilla ice cream as the king of all the flavors?
It is amazing how much a stone can tell you about the one it watches over. Some are great monuments that say ‘I had a lot of money’, but say little more than that, while others are as plain as plain can be and yet speak volumes; The small marker of a child whose parent's anguish can still be felt long after they too have passed. The stone meant for two with only a single name listed or the single stone that cries to the world ‘that the better part of me is gone’. The flat stone that is so obviously homemade out of common cement and traced in by hand or the small craft marker left by a child on the regular stone that simply reads ‘Pop-Pop’.
This one lived a long life and this one was way too short; was one more full than the other? And then there are the graves that are forgotten, where once flowers marked the loss and now only a rusted urn lies on it’s side or the graves that say ‘I am unknown’, where only the curious once visited and then only for a short time.
My father is gone now these past fifteen years and I walk the graves alone and listen to the cicadas of summer as they sing of their short lives, I hear the wind of autumn as it sweeps away at the blazoned trees and of course I acknowledge the stones, left by us who remain behind in this life, to mark the passage of one who has journeyed ahead of us into the next.
And although I say I am alone, I know this not to be true. I remember back when I was a young father and my daughter was an infant. My father and I with baby in tow would set off on our continuing adventure to visit the ancestors. My father would hold her very close to him as we walked the quiet paths and I could hear him telling her the same tales that he told me. It was almost like he was introducing her to old friends and family who although long gone, were still very much a part of our lives. She couldn’t of course understand anything he was saying to her then, but he must have felt his time was short and wanted to pass on a piece of himself to her.
It might sound strange to you that this could be a cherished memory, but you would understand if you could have seen him, holding his granddaughter protectively close to him as if to say to the departed “She is my granddaughter, and I will live on as will we all, through her eyes”.
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