Sort of about cemeteries

Because tomorrow I am going to a memorial service for man who died several months ago in his late 90’s, and was a Christian Scientist, and because I was taught many years ago (when I was related, though marriage, to several very devout Christian Scientists, one of whom regarded a lapsed Catholic, like myself, with pierced ears and a predilection for saints, as a barbarian) that Christians Scientists do not believe in death and hence do not have cemeteries, I have naturally been thinking about cemeteries.
I never understood what exactly was meant when CS’s said they did not believe in death. It seemed to be like saying you did not believe you had five fingers. Or a nose.
Tomorrow’s deceased was not, according to his daughter, a particularly devout Christian Scientist, though the soi-disant religion and its practitioners figured in his life in important ways.

As fond as I am of cemeteries I have always disliked our family’s cemetery. Because it is ugly – mostly -and flat. It is not “our” family’s cemetery in a proprietary sense. It is simply the local catholic cemetery where my grandparents, all four of them, and my father and his brother’s wife are all buried, and where my mother and uncle will be buried at some future time. It seems shameful and shallow to dislike the burial place of one’s few ancestors simply on the grounds of its pedestrian ugliness. But what other grounds could I have?
My mother, who is nothing if not an arbiter of architectural correctness and the landscaping principles of Capability Brown, has never spoken ill of the cemetery in question. She is actually quite proud of her father’s tombstone, a Coptic cross. Her father was not a Copt, and tombstones over six feet high are disallowed by the diocese of Boston. But my mother prevailed against the episcopal powers-that-were, and erected an 8-foot high Coptic cross for her Belgian father’s tombstone. Long after she has forgotten the names of her grandchildren, my mother will gleefully recall her victory over the graveyard guidelines of the diocese of Boston.
My real fondness for cemeteries presumably began when I was at Milton Academy Girls School. Across the street was the Milton Cemetery, beautiful, undulating, and forested in parts, with a pond, Gothiccrypts, and aged fieldstones. We would sneak over there to smoke cigarettes and recite Coleridge, leaning against purple slate gravestones carved with luxurious weeping willows and winged cherubs.
Nowadays, at least once a year we stop by, or maybe only wave to, the graves of CSB’s great-grandparents, in the tiny cemetery in Bingham, Maine, on the shores of the Kennebec River where once massive logs floated down to Skowhegan.
In Duxbury, Massachusetts there is a classic old New England graveyard, where Jeff and I used to make rubbings of pithy epitaphs. I was pregnant with my first child, and it seemed to me then that half the graves belonged to young women who had died in childbirth, and the other half memorialized their infant children. Yet I kept going back there. Jeff’s memorial service was held in the adjacent Unitarian church in Duxbury, but he is not buried there, or anywhere.

Jeff and I never owned a plot in a graveyard anywhere. Neither have CSB and I pre-invested in a final resting place. Throw us to the winds.

One cold night this past January my friend Lis and I went outside to get into the car and drive to JFK. But there on the lawn in front of the house was a strange white van. On the grass. A man climbed out of the van and walked in our direction. I shouted out: Who are you and what are you doing here? Initially he could not speak coherently at all. I went inside to call the local police. Ten minutes later the local police had still not arrived. I called again. (We would learn later that the officer dispatched went to wrong address and finding no one home, returned to the station and did nothing. Yes, not reassuring.) Meanwhile, the van’s driver was wandering around the front lawn making plaintive noises, and insisting that he was not drunk.
Finally a young policeman arrived, and seemed quite relieved when he saw the van and the wandering man. He knew them both. He told us his name. The wandering man and his brother, descended from Italian stonecutters, own the local gravestone business. I had driven past their stone yard hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times on my way to the Cooperative Nursery School with the friendly dinosaur logo, sometime last century.
Finally, Lis and I headed to JFK to fetch the weary traveler. We were giddy. On the Major Deegan we were laughing uproariously because we thought the funniest thing imaginable was that this nighttime intruder who could not walk straight was in fact a carver of gravestones.
No one else seems to think this convergence of details is remotely funny. I still like to visit beautiful cemeteries.

What to do on July Fourth in Maine when there is no more parade in West Athens?*

Check out Father Sébastien Rasle.
Who?
At a pit stop a few days earlier, on our drive north, I picked up a brochure about Somerset Country. All the other brochures were gone, and amazingly, coincidentally, Somerset Country is where are. In that brochure I learned of the existence of Father Rasle, who is named as one of the four (4) famous people of the county. The other three are Benedict Arnold, Margaret Chase Smith, and George Walter Hinckley of the Good Will-Hinckley School, so you can see he is in good company. The brochure, when it isn’t misspelling his name, tells us that Father Rasle was a Jesuit of the early 1700’s, at the time of the French and Indian Wars. The Abenaki Indians – in what was not yet known as Somerset County - were allied with the French against the English. Fr. Rasle worked to convert the Indians, and to that end he created the first French-Abenaki dictionary, the first Abenaki dictionary of any kind.

This is where I became quite excited, because I am interested in early saints and missionaries who, in the course of trying to convert native peoples - an enterprise I am not in favor of - often compiled dictionaries and wrote down languages - enterprises I think are entirely brilliant and worthwhile. (Another of these lexicological priests was Jean de Brebeuf, who compiled the French-Huron dictionary, and famously named the Huron’s favorite sport Lacrosse, because the stick they used reminded him of a bishop’s crozier.)
I also learned that Fr. Rasle’s grave is in Madison, on the other side of the Old Canada Highway from West Athens, and not so far from us. What else could we possibly hope to do on the anniversary of independence? CSB, whose interest in Jesuit philologists could not fill a thimble, was wonderfully agreeable about heading over to Madison, a town we generally note only for its frequent appearance in the Morning Sentinel’s Police Blotter.
So without even stopping for a quick drink at the Solon Hotel (ever-tempting)
we went to Madison and found the cemetery where Father Rasle was buried. Here is CSB looking really happy to pose. The cemetery was full of French Canadian names, and some wonderful gravestones. But this was my favorite. I am guessing that both Robert and Beverly love to play golf. CSB pointed out that they are not yet dead.
On our way home, via Skowhagen, we met up with the Grannies for Peace, marching back and forth across the Old Mill Bridge over the Kennebec, all day long. Being deprived of marching their annual plea for peace in West Athens, they brought their cause to the metropolis. They were delighted to have their picture taken, and of course we talked about our grandchildren.

WHO's who where?

It feels like ages since I have written in SQD and chances are I have missed it more than you, dear readers, who presumably have more important things to do. But for those rare moments requiring distraction, I am returning with a few vignettes from our recent time in glorious Pleasant Pond in the north woods of Maine.
And closer to home, if you happen to visit the NYC offices of NRDC you need only go next door(Save energy! Be environmentally savvy!) to buy your weekly supply of Fake Blood, Cobwebs, Ice Effects and Mustaches.

Do you ever read the WHO’S WHO in the Playbill, hoping for something to catch your interest, spark your imagination, and tell you something other than the episodes of Law & Order in which this actor supported his or her art? Only to be disappointed. That is probably because you are attending theatre in one of the great metropolitan areas, watching serious artists perform serious plays.
But if you are lucky enough to attend any of this summer’s performances at Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan, Maine* you will find in the WHO’S WHO a wealth and breadth of biographical detail you had not dared to dream of. I offer here a few selections; to appreciate the full experience you too will have to sit in a Torquemada™ chair and watch the 350 lb. owner of the hardware store in Moscow, Maine tap dance across the stage (and he was great):

NANCY resides in North Anson and likes Mexican food, An Officer and a Gentleman, Judy Garland, Carol Burnett, the color green and Hawaii 5-0”. She is really good at multi-tasking and wishes she had the magical power to lower energy prices.
JUAN’S pets are named Guido, Rosie and Sully. The 150 guppies are unnamed. He claims he is really good at being patient and his hero is Albert Einstein.
IRVING of Stetson lives with wife Jantha, Zeus the dog, and twin cats, Phantom and Ariel.
MIKE was born in England and his family includes Paris, 4 ½ pounds of attitude with a rhinestone collar. He has a degree in rock mechanics and mining, and works as an insurance advisor. Mike claims he is really good at doing a British accent.
GARY is the doting grandparent of Izabel, Madden, Alyuia and Brennan. A Scorpio, Gary likes chocolate, the color green, “Grey’s Anatomy”, and Henry Fonda. He wishes he had the magical power to change his Maine accent. Gary would like to visit the Holy Land.
GREG resides in Hartland and says, “I was born in the wrong era”. Greg’s hero is his wife Dawn and he claims she says he is “really good at everything”. He wishes he had the power to teleport anywhere in the world.
BOBBY claims he is really good at “being kind”. His heroes are Kurt Vonnegut and Daniel Day-Lewis.

*111 years old, and one of the oldest summer theatres in America, on the western shore of Wesserunsett Lake, this Lakewood should not be confused with the Lakewood Center for the Arts in Oswego, Oregon; or the historic Art-Deco Lakewood Theater in East Dallas, Texas; or the Lakewood Theatre Company of Nashville, TN; or the Lakewood Amphitheatre in Atlanta (its formal name is: The HiFi Buys Amphitheatre) or the Lakewood Cultural Center of Lakewood, Colorado, or the Regal Lakewood Cinema of Lakewood, Washington. The Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan is not only the oldest and hence first Lakewood, but lays claim to the most uncomfortable seats among the Lakewoods, a coveted distinction.

Look for future posts on the Importance of the Jigsaw Puzzle to the American Summer Home; the Social Register at Pleasant Pond; the eternal problem of The Pecking Order; and the Virgin of Caacupé.