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8:20 a.m. - June 06, 2002
On coffins, graveyards, and seeing gray
There was a cemetery near the house where the old time Spanish and Portuguese settlers were buried, the Souzas and Cambios on one side, the peninsulares or californios on the other, separate beyond even the end. I spent a lot of time there as a child and yesterday went back to walk among the memorials and cracked headstones and like before, this cemetery is overgrown and overlooked and I don't know which is worse, to be forgotten or to be uncared for, but on this hot June day the buttercups were profuse and rambled everywhere and the sun was warm on the stones and I lay there thinking about all the times I wished I, too, were dead and buried where everything could be quiet and at rest and eventually forgotten.

When I began spending time in the cemetery I became its groundskeeper in a way, clearing brush and throwing alyssum and buttercup seeds everywhere, seeds I stole from the jar the old retired couple down the street kept in their garage and the one-legged ancienne showed me how to collect seeds from existing plants and save them for planting later. A small effort for minor results and buttercups grow forever, spreading out until they can cover graves and the metal shopping cart and yesterday climbing over the gate there was a momentary flush of pride and accomplishment, two sensations I haven't encountered for a while. I found my grave and again cleared it, Josef Souza, b. 1830 d. 1840, but this time I was too big to lay in an imaginary coffin but I did anyways, my feet hanging over the edge and breathing in the scent of buttercups and listening to the air play across my face and the same thoughts flitted through my mind then as before, but this time I got up, brushed off my jeans, and walked around the graves.

The problem with growing up is that you can't stay young forever and be stubbornly steadfast in shades of black and white, seeing only childish innocence. Growing up adds tincture so that there is black, white, and gray and therein lies the rub of being an adult, having to make choices, choices about whether or not to stay in a coffin or get up and live again. I didn't die back then like I hoped, like I thought, but inside something did and today I'm an emotional child desperate for the black and white and resisting the gray that's there.

Thought about this laying there feeling comforted like I was before, secure that nobody would find or bother me, content to listen to the bees.

 

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