CSotD: Vita brevis, commedia longa
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Thought we'd just hit an odd moment the other day, but the end-of-life jokes are still coming.
It's not a trend over at Stone Soup, but rather a story arc, as Evie tries to reassure Val that things are fine.
For regular readers, the secondary joke here is a running gag over the fact that everyone but Evie is concerned about Evie's age. Evie herself is prone to disappearing into the Third World on humanitarian missions periodically, upon one of which she acquired a boyfriend, and, if she's winding things up, she's sure got a fun way of doing it.
I remember my father expressing a little uncertainty about whether he'd done all with his life that he could have, but he was quite a bit younger than Evie and the moment apparently passed quickly. It was more of a mid-life crisis than a case of vain regret, and, in his case, almost laughable, given what he had put together in terms of earning a good living, providing a lot of public service and always being present for his family.
For my part, I had the good luck to hit that stage just as Peter Coyote's memoir, "Sleeping Where I Fall," came out. It's an unsentimental but affectionate look at the era from someone who was very much on the ground floor — he was a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, hung out with some major names of the time and was present at some pivotal moments.
But it's not an exercise in name-dropping — which would have left me sadly grasping for straws — so much as a reminder of what we were there for, which, by the by, was not what TIME Magazine told everybody that we were there for.
And it had — has — a lot to do with Evie's comment in the middle panel: If you like where you're at, you ought not to despise the road that got you there. Plus the old half-acid-half-zen thing about it being your own movie to direct.
Coincidentally, I was thinking last night about someone I met at a moment when the timing was off by so little that, had it been 24 hours earlier, my life might have taken a very different direction. But my response was more of affectionate nostalgia than vain regret. Yes, it would have been interesting. But life has been pretty interesting as it is.
After all, if we'd all been living in California, it would have been different.
And speaking of being the director of your own movie, well, pick up the damn megaphone and do something about it, Basil.
Speaking of "zoom!" shouldn't a "catafalque" fling the beloved to his final resting place?
Today's Bizarro sounds a considerably lighter note and evokes a considerably lighter memory.
When my grandfather died, I went with my father to the funeral home to make arrangements which, by Grandpa's direct orders, consisted mostly of buying a box and putting it in the ground with only what minimal graveside ceremony we required to get ourselves through the process.
But, if wailing and throwing ourselves on the coffin were not the order of the day, we were still supposed to remain somewhat solemn, and the visit quickly became an unspoken exercise in not looking at each other.
We made it through the "waterproof" part okay, because, well, sure, okay, I guess. But when he started praising the virtues of the innerspring mattress, I think we both began to wish we'd put on the dark trousers earlier.
We weren't ten feet out the door when we both lost it, and our previous decorum was entirely for the benefit of the funeral director, not Grandpa, who would have enjoyed the laugh as much as we did.
Gene Weingarten et al share a more frivolous attitude towards the afterlife which brings to mind the true-life story of Woody Guthrie's endgame, in which a small group of his family and friends trooped down to the water's edge at Coney Island to scatter his ashes, which were in a sealed can.
His widow had one of those can openers that you used to use on beer cans that punches a triangle, which would have worked if crematoria ground the ashes into a fine powder.
Which they do not. Shaking the can produced a trickle of ash and then a clogged hole.
Daughter Nora recalled the solemn ceremony that followed: "We climbed out on the rocks and it was really windy and we were
slipping on the rocks. We threw the whole can in, and it bobbed along
and came back on shore. It kept happening. Finally, we held the can down
in the water, filled it with a little water and chucked it in. The can
is probably still out there."
So long, old chum. It's been good t'know you.
I've told my kids that I'll be perfectly happy to be similarly put into a coffee can and buried in the family plot and that I don't care if they sneak up there at midnight with a post-hole digger to do the deed, but I want my name actually engraved on the stone, not just scrawled there with a Magic Marker.
I like the idea of a stone, of something marking the fact that I once passed by. I was driving cross-country a good many years ago and stopped off in Iowa to find this chunk of stone, under which is (at least according to the inscription) the mortal remains of my mother's great-grandfather and, if you follow around the stone, those of her great-grandmother as well.
I liked knowing they were there. Nothing about disembodied, hovering spirits or anything. Just a bit of permanence in an impermanent universe.
I walk through the cemetery near my place a couple of times a week and no I don't let the dog do anything untoward while we are there. But I do read the stones and try to imagine the people named.
Boy, I'll bet her life was a barrel of laughs.
Ah well, change what you can and have some faith about the rest. As the sailors used to say, "To live hard, work hard, die hard and go to Hell at last would be hard indeed."
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