Objects In Motion, Objects at Rest

The show went very well - it ended well, so all was well.

The music did its job, it provided a smooth wash during the performance; the "train station" music painted an evocative picture of Portland back in the Victorian era, the jangling bells matching the "conductor's" weaving of actual historic speeches into the beginning of the play.

Once you got the hang of watching from many different angles it was a lot of fun and very well performed. I was accompanied by a medical friend with a lot of stage experience, this person's reaction was also very positive.

After that a little shopping on a brilliant Old Port night, a gelato (sorbetto, in my case) and now I'm home doing some catch up work put off by the final push of writing for the show. Soon I'll put a YouTube video together in case you'd like to hear it.

Seven days ago I was sitting in my secret, sunken garden, processing my father's illness.

Six days ago I took time in the blazing 101º heat of an Oklahoma afternoon to drive East, along the Dan P. Holmes Memorial Highway (Highway 33 - Mr. Holmes was a fierce advocate who paid for his own commercial after every Sunday night late news show - he touted his own insurance business and always finished with a push for "that highway 33, heading to Joplin, MO" - years after his death the state actually built an ultra-modern highway and named it after this not-so-Quixotic Okie - God, I love to be a native of this state - would hate to live there now, but am proud to be from there).

I headed East, up into the Cherokee hills, East of Salina. When I was a child it was all a dusty red-gravel road, now it was smooth and paved, twisting along the bottom of a long, broad valley, green hills hundreds of feet high on either side.

To my right a stream, Brush Creek by name, slow, barely moving, carried in a bed made of white rocks the size of a chid's fist.  The water looked tired, as if dragged down by the heat. I knew from experience that this kind of flow meant that the water would be warm and snakes, especially the dreaded water moccasin - or cotton-mouth - would be loose inside it.

As much as the heat drove me to consider taking a wade in the water prudence bade me leave it be.

There, rounding a turn onto a side road, was the Euwala Baptist Church grounds: a bell-topped main sanctuary, a Fellowship Hall and attached class space.

An open shed for dinners and meetings was next to it, large, too-bright plastic playground equipment beside it.

Behind - the graveyard.

Not a cemetery but a graveyard.  The place where people from the hills ... in the hills .... came to leave their dead.

The grave decorations bespoke the Cherokee sense that people still seem to be with us - not as ghosts but as present spirits. Almost every grave was covered with some kind of object that bespoke raw feeling, connection, placation, compassion.

The decorations said "are you watching? are you listening? can you see this gift, this toy, this flower?"  I contrasted it with the cemeteries I'd seen here in Maine, pretty, designed "memorial parks", so dignified, so contained.  This graveyard screamed loss and love, screamed passion and sorrow and joy.

One was marked with a simple cross of PVC pipe, like you'd get at the hardware store, drilled together and stuck in the red earth.

Some were covered with dolls, some with toy turtles, some gravestones had inlaid pictures of the deceased.

One had guitars engraved on it with an actual University of Oklahoma banner, signed by friends, hanging from a wire post.  I tucked the edge of the banner against the bend in the metal so that wind wouldn't bunch it up and the "OU" could show proudly in the breeze.

Memorial Day was not all that long ago, no heavy rain had happened yet, most things looked very fresh, as if dropped off only a day or so before.

A jackrabbit broke cover to my left, ran across the bare end of the field, headed for a pile against the fence, a pile made of discarded plastic flowers, all in a big trashpile along the property fence. The rabbit raced across in front of me then slowed down, stopped, looked at me before scampering away.

And after a diligent search I found it - my mother's grave.  The stone was very low, carved from red granite.  I sat down next to it, looking at the three simple plastic flower arrangements. No toys or engraved guitars or pictures - just a simple, simple stone with her name, dates, a quote from the children "Love is forever". A Bible verse from my dad about a wife being a great joy.

It was very, very hot. I sat on the grass and rough soil, a few steps, a very few steps, from the loading dock of an abandoned warehouse, just over the chicken wire of the fence.

As is the habit of the children of our family I cleaned the grass off the grave - I did leave the clover.

I'm always leaving the clover.

A sweating mess, I sat back down and talked to my mother. It was things I needed to say more than things she needed to listen to.

I told her about all the things that had happened since I'd last been there two years before, my successes and failures, my loves and hates.

I introduced friends I'd met, people I'd worked with, danced with, taught, cursed, questioned, embraced, ignored. So many things as the Oklahoma sun beat down and I slowly became tired and heated and a little dizzy.

There came a point when I had said my piece, when words were done and just like sitting with my father in his darkened, quiet hospital room I sat with my mother, just sat, hot tears raining off my face, not wanting to move, letting them fall onto the red, stony earth that covered her last physical remains.

Watering the clover.

Who knows, perhaps it might grow.

Portland, Maine