The Artist Date is a dream-child of Julia Cameron. We’ve discussed her book, The Artist’s Way, and highly recommend both the book and the weekly date. It can be life-changing. It can open your creativity like nothing else. This week, we’re taking a sharp right into St. Augustine’s, then down the hill to where the willow grows.
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I know where I’m going after I drop my girl to her volunteer job, so I pop Lady Gaga out of the player and flick in Alison Krauss and Union Station, Lonely Runs Both Ways.
I’m trying to listen to song lyrics, maybe memorize a few to bring back from my Artist Date, but my girl is chattering about how Kelly answered her question on selling prints. “How much do you think mine are worth?” she’s asking. I turn Alison down so I can discuss the value of a budding photographer’s work.
At the Montessori, I drop my girl, as always, and watch her long orange wool coat as she meanders up the stone steps to the double green doors. She knocks. They open. A curved hand, Cristina’s, waves to me, and the doors close. I’m off.
“Gone tomorrow, here today, just in case you’ve got somethin’ to say, ” Alison is singing twang-sweetness between fiddles.
I cross the highway, yield slightly at the sign, point my car south on 134, then take a sharp right into St. Augustine’s. “Who owns death?” I think. Then I pass a white sign with brown letters “friends and family only, ” drive past Jesus still dead in Mary’s lap, and swerve ’round a host of angels rising in white sculpture to the blue spring sky.
It occurs to me that the bottom (the back?) of the cemetery might have the oldest stones. I want that. So I drive down and down, past a rusty plow sitting by itself on the wide-open hills to the left. Over a narrow bridge I make my way to where the willow grows. I park my blue Volvo. I don’t have time for death today. Someone is coming to clean the furnace in forty minutes. So I’ll need something to keep time. I pick my cell phone out of my bag, press the button until I feel the buzz under my index finger, and notice a little icon I’ve never noticed before. It comes to light on the screen, “LG. Life’s good.”
Now I’m out of the car. Banana oatmeal muffin in one hand, black Canon Powershot dangling from my right wrist. A big “Rest in Peace” inscription catches my eye, as a Boar’s Head meat truck goes barreling by on the highway to the west. I start to explore the stones. James Lyons 1863-1897 husband of Brigid Clark. Bridget wife of Patrick Maguire a native of the Parish of Killskerry Tyrone Ireland. Punctuation is only partly necessary where the dead are concerned. I think I read somewhere that every chisel bears a cost. Maybe that’s why Bridget has no birth date, though she died in 1869.
Mary Hogerty started death alone. Her name is all but worn from the top of her stone. Died 1825. But then she got company in 1896 and 1945 respectively. Daughter of daughter of mother Mary.
The Furaro Family seems ready for anything. No stone slab to keep death firmly on the other side. Rather, a single tall tombstone watches over a cavernous space that is broached by wooden beams. Easy to lift when necessary. Come on in, I can almost hear them saying.
As in all cemeteries, there is the early death. I find William, son of Thomas and Catharine Welch. Died December 19, 1866, aged 10 mos and 22 days. Twenty-two days. Someone was counting. The days of a child, one year after the end of the American Civil War. William would miss sharing time with Laura Ingalls Wilder (born 1867).
I decide to walk all the way to the very last corner of the plots. A simple stone is set there. “Mother.” I am tempted to make something of it, because it’s the perfect detail a writer could whoop up into some kind of dramatic point. But in the end, I won’t. I’m the girl who lost the May Queen festival to Lisa Collyer when I said I wanted to play a golden flute like James Galway. Lisa had quietly smiled to the crowd and said, “I just want to be a mother, because the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Why I was part of the May Queen festival is another question altogether. In any case, now I take a picture of Mother and move on.
It is time for me to get back home for the furnace cleaning. I walk the path more quickly. Emma Murray William Elizabeth Frank Dennis Mary Thomas Mary Patrick Bridget Michael Jane Daniel Margaret Peter Patrick Margret Jeremiah Mary Patrick Ellen Mary Mathias Mattie Elida. Elida was born April 22, 1860, under which it simply says, “Died.”
I get into the Volvo, back my way out, and notice a white-haired man putting on boots and knee pads. I drive past, slow the car and peer at him through the rear-view mirror. Now he’s clearing away the space in front of a brick-colored tombstone. I see a small orange-mouthed shovel and chisels of every size. I want to ask what he is doing, but I drive up the big hill and leave him in peace. At the last stretch of the drive, I consider that my friend Andrea’s house is just over those trees. I turn my wheel to the right and look both ways. If I wave to her from beyond, I wonder, will she see?
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Post by L.L. Barkat, author of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing
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L.L. Barkat
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Monica Sharman says
I wonder why you wanted the oldest stones.
And the one that says Mother. It reveals more about the person writing than the one written about. Maybe that’s another clue on why fiction is so revealing—when I write about someone else, I reveal the most about me.
L.L. Barkat says
Fascinated by times gone by, I guess 🙂
And the old stones are more mysterious because you can’t easily read them. Some? I had to trace my fingers in the inscriptions and feel my way to the information, because I couldn’t see, they were so worn.
As for photographing Mother, she was the “cornerstone,” except I would not make that point even though I could. As a writer, I have choices to make. I could have gotten a few people to even cry if I’d manipulated my readers with the drama of a Mother-as-cornerstone point. But I am not that kind of writer.
That said, it is cool to think about the possibilities of Mother as both beginning and end. After all, depending on which way you approach the stone from, it’s either the last or the first in the cemetery 🙂
Maureen Doallas says
Your piece reminds me of the times I’ve spent walking through Arlington Cemetery, where my father is buried in one of the oldest sections. The mix and juxtaposition of the very old and the newer, not found in the sections where, say only those from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are, can startle and yet the longer one lingers there the more time has no meaning.
The implications of the “Mother” stone are wonderful to consider.
L.L. Barkat says
I’ve been trying to articulate to my girls why this was such an amazing, centering, actually hopeful Artist Date. Maybe you’ve put your finger on it there… the lingering where time has no meaning… I think that dynamic existed in my experience too.
Also, I was really taken, once I got home and realized that I had been looking at stones around the time before the first functional sewing machine existed.
Elizabeth W. Marshall says
“It’s time to get back home for the furnance cleaning”. You startle me with this line, bring me back to the mundane and ordinary, but back to life nonetheless. I leave the grey of death here. Felt like cold water on me as reader.
Alison Kraus’ “gone tomorrow here today”, love the mood set by this line.
Interesting how you notice LG life is good on the way to study death and walk the tombstone trails.
This need to seek out the oldest, I get. The more patina, the more worn, the greater my interest. The further away from now, the richer the study becomes. Mystery in the faded.
L.L. Barkat says
Were you startled? Oh, that’s very interesting. (Sorry, here’s a warm towel 😉 )
I couldn’t have planned it better, to have Alison singing those lines. But then maybe there are details all around us waiting to be brought out, that we begin to notice once we have a direction we begin to take.
Ah! You’re a mystery girl too? Love 🙂
Donna says
This struck me as well… this thread of things noticed all along the way… the song, the question you ask and the quick answer provided by the sign, all the way to the LG message and then this, “If I wave to her from beyond, I wonder, will she see?” Oh my.
Elizabeth, that last line… Mystery in the faded… that’s going to stick with me today!
(P.S. LL thank you for not making me cry. 🙂 Oh how I love this whole section on MOTHER and the way you handled it by saying how you’re not handling it)
L.L. Barkat says
Heh. You saw my handling trick! 😉
There were so many things noticed. As writers we then have choices about what to include, what to leave behind. What to juxtapose.
I didn’t mention the little brook, the way some tombs were set up like mansions (even the dead seem to live in hierarchy), or how I dug my fingers into the dirt and lifted two small patches of tiny purple wildflowers to take home.
The flowers are now planted in my back lawn (I have this interesting little habit of bringing wildflowers back from places where they haven’t been put out of existence by pesticides and overplanting of grass seed. It’s like this secret project of mine. My back yard is not today what it was when this place was bought 🙂
Donna says
Are they the blooms in the 2nd image? Like purple stars on the ground. So you collect flowers too. 🙂 Must be quite a yard.
L. L. Barkat says
the second image, yes. It’s hard to tell just how tiny they are. So lovely. 🙂
The yard… is getting there.
Sheila Seiler Lagrand says
I read this passage:
“Died December 19, 1866, aged 10 mos and 22 days. Twenty-two days. Someone was counting.”
Instantly five years wind by in reverse.I am at the hospital bedside of my dead mother, and I’m counting. 72 years. One month. 10 days. And I am wondering if we have her birth certificate, if I can find out the time of her birth, confirm that it was truly 10 days and not nine and some hours, as she died at 7:03 a.m. It’s very important to me, calculating exactly the duration of her earthly existence.
And then I move on to your next paragraph. . .
Ooof.
L. L. Barkat says
Sheila. Putting an arm around you.
Down to the time of birth. This counting. This recounting. These rituals we make, or discover. It’s how we continue to love. It’s how we grieve. It’s how we heal. And how we come back sometimes, when we realize there is some part of us that will never stop counting, never really heal.
Sheila Seiler Lagrand says
Aw, Laura, thank you.
It was more of a “well, that’s interesting” kind of ooof than a “plunging back into the abyss of grief” kind of ooof.
And that in itself was interesting.
L. L. Barkat says
Say more?
Sheila Seiler Lagrand says
Hmm. I need to reflect.
I think my first thought was, “Everyone should have someone to count.”
Kathryn Neel says
I’m reminded of the tradition in my family where part of the yearly family reunion was spent cleaning up the cemetery next to this little church my great grandfather founded. Everyone buried there was a relative of some sort. As a child, I use to think of it as the living bringing the party to the deceased.
The older members of the family would tell stories about the deceased to the children so we would “know where we came from”. Some of the stories were funny, some serious, but all provided a sense of belonging and place.
Katie says
Kathryn,
Thank you for sharing this family tradition. It is beautiful and so meaningful.
“As a child, I used to think of it as the living bringing the party to the deceased.” LOVE that thought:)
Also, your final paragraph about the elders sharing stories with the youngers, and thereby providing a sense of belonging and place.
Gratefully,
Katie
Elizabeth Anne May (@seasonswithsoul) says
I love that you choose this. I actually have Allegheny Cemetery (a beautiful, historic place in the city of Pittsburgh) on my Artist Date wish list.
L. L. Barkat says
would love to hear about it if you go 🙂 I like the idea of the “historic place” aspect.