Graveyards and My Long Dead Past

I buried my past.

The summer after my freshman year of college I returned to my hometown because my mother was in the hospital, but that was my final summer in the town where I grew up. Six months later I came back again for my father's funeral. After that there were a few scattered  Christmases. Some hurried stops on summer vacations.

No one recognizes me now. The raven waist-length tresses and apple cheeks are gone. Both my maiden name and the married name that some might have heard of are now erased. I call myself by my maternal grandmother's maiden name, and it would take a certain amount of explaining to make people understand why I required this self-made rebaptism. 

Sometimes I feel as worn and askew as the grave markers in the old town cemetary when I think of the water that's coursed beneath my personal bridge. Many of these monuments are almost 200 hundred years old, and the names they once bore have been scoured into oblivion. The town's founding father merits a shiny new tombstone, but I was disappointed to find no trace of the original stone that marked his grave.

Presumably his bones still lie beneath the earth, but the headstone feels to me like an impostor. I ask myself if I'm an impostor, too, but it's more complicated than that.

After all these years if I somehow met my past self, I would take her by the hand and lead her into the present. I barely remember you, I'd tell her. But we have some catching up to do.

A Whale of a Week, A Whale of a Love Affair, A Whale of a Visit, A Whale of a Trip, and Just Plain Whales

The last excursion of the "granddaughter week" was a whale watching trip. "I can't promise you we'll see whales," I told the girl who's been to Sea World twice. Ha. We were mugged by Humpbacks, which is whale watching boat parlance for being so surrounded that the boat can't move. Take that, Sea World. We saw Blue Whales, too. It's not a small event---seeing the world's largest animal--but it was the breathing of the Humpbacks, so close to us, so like immense human sighs, that surprised me.

And the dolphins again--this time a nursery pod with babies, hundreds of them the size of footballs. I love the things the guides tell us on these boat rides. The Common Dolphin cannot survive in captivity, they said. Without their family group, they perish in five days, they said. They loose their ability to echolocate.

Location can be everything in a love affair. The Man Who Loves Me, who I thought for a few days might not weather my change of location, was at the train station when the kid and I got off the boat. Immense human sigh.

Instead of driving halfway to Phoenix to hand off the granddaughter, her mom and her auntie came with the other kids to stay for three days and then take her home. They were good sports and did their own thing while I hung out waiting for plumbers and contractors to do this or that in my final push to finish up jobs at the house before I bring my mom to live with me.

Who am I when I'm with you? Are all of us changing our spots, doing the chameleon thing? The little girl/deep thinking budding psychologist turned into a less-than-charming martinet once the little brother and sister were back on the scene. Ah, well. Little human sigh. This just reinforces my plan to take those kids one at a time.

And so, with barely time to pack, I was back in the arms of The Man Who Loves Me. Echolocation working fine, thank you. Then onto a plane 12 hours later, and into a rental car, and driving for five hours, and then into my home town, which cannot be visited without a plunge into the past. See other blog, and peruse while thinking about the Common Dolphin. And imagine these steeples rising above the cornfields, rising above everything, visible from five miles or so away as you drive down the highway. And weird, how the photo won't load properly. But there it is--the fractured picture of a particular church that I thought might crumple and crush me, like Samson in the temple in the movie "The Ten Commandments," as I sat through dozens of masses as a secretly pregnant 16/17-year-old.

And so here I am, struggling a bit with my echolocation, in my hometown. But my mother is here, and next week, after a thirty-hour drive spread over an as yet undetermined number of days, I will return with her  to the land of the whales where I will listen for their sighs.