We took off at 10 in the morning and got to the cemetery way before the noon start time. Flint Memorial Park is a couple miles from the house where Sis and I grew up, and from Clio where kids learn that it's okay to drop big rocks off freeway overpasses, that might kill people. My home town. In name only though . . . we went to school in Mt. Morris but there really isn't a dime's worth of difference between them. Sometimes I wonder how I escaped from both without turning into the white trailer trash I was forced to share my space with for 12 years of school, the most critical time of anyone's emotional and intellectual development.
But I digress.
Unlike in the world where distracted snowflakes and middle-aged lipstick lesbians run the show, cemeteries start things on time. If you ask for a 12 noon memorial service, it starts at 12 noon.
I didn't have to be there, and didn't have to say anything at the grave site, but I was, and I did. I owed that much to the family, remembering the morning at my grandmother's house almost 59 years ago when I awoke and Gran told me "you have a new baby sister." I was there at the beginning, as much as I could be at age five, and wanted to be there at the end. Alpha and omega.
Attention, all present and future anti-social cat ladies who don't have any friends: when you piss off everyone up to and including your last living family member, you get a memorial service attended by the cemetery lady, your next of kin who could have stayed home on a freezing cold Groundhog Day but didn't, his driver, and the two cemetery workers tasked with filling the hole and leveling the marker. And the groundhog. That's it. All of us saw our shadows and, as soon as we could, split for warmer surroundings.
By comparison, five mourners attended the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald,
and thirty people attended Charles Manson's open-casket funeral in Porterville, California.
Maybe none of this matters to you now, but it will, someday when the time comes, the clock starts ticking, and you realize . . . anyway: mission accomplished, NO thanks to any of the Good People associated with our wonderful and blessed Blue Water Area churches and charities who turned their backs on the writer in his time of need. More about them in tomorrow's post.
Meanwhile, have another look at what's left of my female sibling. She shares a space with Mother, her only friend and ally as things turned out, who rescued her from more scrapes large and small than I care to remember. Sis chose to go out as she lived: by making an ash of herself.
She may be looking up at me as I write; reading over my shoulder. That is, when she isn't either bitching about the heat or looking for the air conditioning control. (Uhhh . . . if you haven't figured it out by now, there isn't one, and make yourself at home. Today is the first day of the rest of your eternal life.)
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