Candy Land

Last year on Thanksgiving I visited my parents’ grave at Oakwood Cemetery for the first time since my mother’s funeral in February of 1987. There was still snow in patches on the ground a week after Valentine’s Day and it was the first time I had ever seen my father’s grave although he was buried just after Thanksgiving in 1964.
Today I went again, intending to make it a yearly pilgrimage of sorts. I have visited half a dozen cemeteries lately to do research for a school project. In rural areas I found that silk and plastic floral arrangements dominate the remembrances of the living for the dead. A close second is plastic resin or cement garden ornaments in the shapes of bunnies and angels. Flags are stuck by the headstones here and there. There are tiny pilgrims in black hats and buckle shoes, mylar balloon bouquets and at one site, homemade mobiles constructed from wire clothes hangers and plastic bead ornaments. However, Oakwood is in Raleigh, the capital city, and most survivors of the residents would consider such offerings tacky. I did not know what kind of gesture I should make to my parents, what I should bring to the clod and sod potluck. Plus I am broke and can’t go get mums or something from the Food Lion.
“What do you think of silk flowers on a grave?” I asked my friend Lucy. “They look okay when they’re new, but they look really pitiful when they’ve been out in the weather for awhile.”
“I think they look like the tokens of white trash,” Lucy said.
“Ouch. That was harsh,” I said. “Maybe bulbs?”
“I don’t think they let you do that at Oakwood,” Lucy said. “Or we’d see lots of graves blooming in the spring.”
So I was kind of stuck because I happen to have a silk poinsettia in the closet from last Christmas I could take over there. And I happen to have some freesia bulbs in the refrigerator I never got around to planting this fall. My parents have a polished granite stone that reads, “KING” resting on a lush hill of trimmed Bermuda grass. I could drag my St. Francis birdfeeder over there but it would look as out of place as a lawn jockey. I could leave a stone as I do when I visit my friend Stuart in the Jewish cemetery next door but I thought it would just confuse my parents who were Episcopalians. I decided on birdseed. I had a third of a bag of Kroger Wild Bird Food. I would sprinkle some around their grave and maybe throw a handful on my friend Becky who died last year and is also at Oakwood. It’s good enough to pitch at brides and grooms, it’ll do fine for the deceased.
My husband Andy has had some kind of bronchitis for 3 days and said he was not up to visiting dead relatives. Duncan, my son, said he would come and keep me company. We turned left onto Person St. at the Krispy Kreme and took a right. I was talking on the cell phone to my friend Mickey. I asked directions to the cemetery and he told me. Duncan and I were walking up hill toward Chapel Circle where my parents are when Mickey called me again. “What?” I said. “I just want to make sure you got there,” he told me. “I know how you drive.” He’s right, but I just said we made it, thanks, good-bye.

Thanksgiving day was cold and wet and raw but today was sunny t-shirt weather with a Faberge blue sky. Good cemetery weather. It being about 3 in the afternoon, the sun was gilding the stones and warming the bark of cedar and magnolia trees. Mockingbirds bopped around doing whatever mockingbirds do. Squirrels snacked on acorns. Duncan tried to decipher memorial verses from 1889 and 1906. He took a picture of the Moore family plot. It has a pedestal with a bust of some guy who looks like a dyspeptic George Washington. There is a Queen Anne roof over his head. Mr. Dude was apparently quite the statesman and soldier. Rich, too from the looks of his monument. He is just as dead as Charles “Snooky” Stafford down the slope a ways under a simple marker that looks like a marble toaster. Two women powerwalked past us.
“What she does,” said the woman in pink and Teva sandals, “is she makes them all come to the table and eat dinner together every night. That’s how she does.”
The other woman with the dark pageboy smiled at me and shook her head in disbelief at how she did. I think they lived in the neighborhood and used the paved Candy Land layout of Oakwood for an exercise circuit. Hell, it would motivate me to get my blood pressure down. Dogs are not allowed in the cemetery.
Last year when Andy and I came, I found the headstone of a man who went down with his ship during the San Francisco earthquake. That’s style.
“I’m going to have a decorated tombstone,” Duncan told me. “I was thinking of gay guys, too.”
My daughter Phoebe told me she was going to have a headstone with gold glittery flecks and dancing gay men etched in it. We were waiting for our takeout Moo Goo Gai Pan at the Beansprout.
“Why?” I asked her.
“I’m going to be dead. I’m not going to be depressed, too.”
“Oh,” I said. “How are you going to make them look like gay men?”
“High heels,” she said. She works at costume shop.
I could picture it.
“Maybe Bubbles, too,” Duncan said, shuffling toward the Poyners and the Daniels’. Bubbles, not like in soap bubbles. At the gated entrance to Oakwood Duncan told me a joke he made up himself. Here it is:
“When you were a kid, did you blow Bubbles?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, get ready because he’s back in town.” Duncan is 14.
Nasty. I laughed anyway.
“Duncan, I am your mother,” I reminded him.
He tossed his hair out of his face and grinned at me.

Back on the hill I found my parents. They face West toward downtown and beyond that, toward my house in Ridgewood. I reached in the plastic bag and slung some millet and sunflower seeds on lip of the headstone. A little on the top.
“Duncan,” I called.
He was trying to read a verse from Thessalonians with his fingers.
“Come over here and throw some seeds on your grandparents.”
“Okay.” He tossed some and then looked at me like, now what?
I had been kind of hoping he would be moved in some way, it being his first time there. But he never knew them. If Duncan had been moved, I was sure it would move me. As it was, my parents’ marker might as well have said “Road Construction Next 4 Miles.” As it was, I felt nothing. I didn’t feel anything last year either. I got no vibe at all from my folks.
On the other hand, for the past three weeks off and on I have smelled my mother’s face powder in my bedroom. After she first died, my brother asked her for a sign. He had a handheld Radio Shack electronic slot machine. My mother loved Las Vegas. “Give me a sign, Ma. Let me know if you’re okay.” He pushed the button and hit the jackpot. “Good enough,” he said. He has never been to the cemetery.
“Well,” I said. Duncan was already headed down to the car. “See you later, Ma,” I said, just in case she was there and my bandwidth didn’t reach that station. “Bye, Daddy.”
Duncan and I climbed up another hill and found my friend Becky and her husband Jimmy. They got some seeds too. Walking back to the car I saw a big headstone that said, “Holeman,” my mother’s maiden name. Sure enough, there was my grandfather, his first wife, who died in the flu epidemic in 1917, and his second wife, my grandmother who committed suicide by turning on the gas oven. My grandfather died in 1928 of pernicious anemia. Nowadays they’d just give him B-12. Eleven feet away I found my fifth grade teacher. I wished I’d had some Kroger Wild Bird Food left to toss in respect. I stood for a moment, but Duncan was in the car waiting.

We pulled out of the stone arch and iron gate and headed toward what I hoped was the way home. Mickey was at the movies and I had to find my own way back.
“So, Dunc, what do you think?”
“I think you should get me some doughnuts.” He stuck his head out of the window and inhaled. We would pass right by it.
“Why should I?” I said.
“Because,” he said, “I’m Duncan.”
And he was right.