Saturday, February 9, 2013

Requiem, Number N+1...

Well, we're back.

Yesterday, John and I drove down to Ocean City, so we'd be sure not to miss the memorial service for our friend Doug Frew.  The blizzard alert was a bit too stern-sounding for John to ignore, especially as he wanted time to practice the organ pieces he'd picked for the program, so I decided to bend to his better judgement.  Besides, leaving early and staying overnight meant we'd get to eat breakfast in a different diner.

And actually, we got to eat lunch and dinner and breakfast, in one restaurant and two different diners. Plus we had a nice motel semi-suite all to ourselves.  Never mind that the alarm clock went off without our having set it, hours before we intended to get up.  Or that there'd been an ice storm in the night, and most of the outdoor surfaces with which it was necessary to come into contact, were coated with the slick and chip-resistant stuff.  Or that, two hours after the alarm clock woke us (hours earlier than we'd intended to get up, remember) the entire motel complex inexplicably lost power.  So much for the hot breakfast we'd been promised.  The manager on duty had run out and brought a couple of boxes of Dunkin' Donuts coffee.  I was so glad I'd ironed my shirt the night before.  I figured I could shave in the semi-darkness.  We packed hastily, and John checked us out somehow, while I prized the car free of its extra layer of frozen wonderfulness.  And then we drove to that breakfast in a different diner.  A diner with 'It's a Wonderful Life' on a big plaque on one wall.  And that served its own home made sausage.  Yum.

Then we went to the church, where John resumed the arcana of preparing the organ -- pulling this and pushing that, and piling books under the unadjustable bench, so it was the proper height.  Setting up recording equipment, and his new iPad as a movie camera.  I sat in the very back of the large sanctuary, off to one side, doing the Sudoku and crossword puzzles from Friday's NYPost, and hoping that no one would see me, or want to talk with me.

This, of course, was not to be.

A Facebook friend of Doug's, who'd become a cyber-friend of mine too, recognized me (how, I'll never know), and then John needed something from the car, and then about five different floral arrangements arrived, all at the same time, and Doug's sister was busy greeting new arrivals, so I just fiddled with the baskets and vases and little tables and then another basket I hadn't seen, until things looked nice, and then it was pretty much time for the service to begin.  I folded the unsolved crossword puzzle and stuck it in my back pocket.

For the service itself, rather than sitting way in the back, I sat right up front, because John had told me what hymns we'd be singing, and I wanted to sing very very loud.  And even though our friendship was so relatively new, I also had something I wanted to say about Doug, if there would be an appropriate time for such things.  And frankly, after having sat in the back of innumerable classrooms because my last name begins with Z, every once in a while I like to move forward.

John played beautifully, with authority and tenderness.  I think Doug would have approved.  The crowd sang with much more conviction than I'd expected -- perhaps because the songs were so familiar, perhaps because Doug was a musician, and this was a concrete way for them to acknowledge the importance of music in his life.  I'll certainly never know for sure, and besides, it doesn't really matter.

The service was taking place in a Methodist church, officiated by a Methodist minister, and although, as I'd discovered, much to my surprise, that Doug had recently converted to Catholicism, the two other guest ministers who spoke were Protestant.  One of them gave some warm personal reminiscences about Doug.  Then we in the congregation were given that chance to share, individually, from the pews, some of our Doug stories.  I stumbled though my little piece, surprised at how choked up I got before it was over.

Then other minister gave what I felt was a tasteless harangue, drawn from one of the many unpleasant Pauline possibilities, focusing on our sinfulness and some other stuff that I stopped paying attention to, because I'd found a blank envelope in the pew, and started to doodle furiously, making angry black marks on the white paper.  Sketching one of the angry black and white masks I keep thinking I want to make, but don't want to have.  He finally shut up and sat down, and we soiled, sinful creatures said the Lord's Prayer, sang Amazing Grace, and John played some more beautiful music.  I was still angry when the service was over.  

We were all invited into the church's social hall, for a bit of a meal, and more chances to talk with each other, and look more closely at the photos from Doug's youth and young manhood, all of which had been nicely arranged on two boards.  By then, I'd pretty much reached my social saturation point, and was hoping we could leave soon, but there were many goodbyes to be said, and then little sudden eruptions of unexpected conversations, and more goodbyes, and things to be gotten from around the organ.  I'm amazed sometimes that I don't just burst into flames, I become so intent on disappearing as quickly as possible.

When we'd finally extricated ourselves, and had packed the car, John asked if I wanted to look for the candy shop that Doug had always liked.  I thought this was unnecessary, and another delay, until John spotted the shop's sign, just a block away.  Chocolate.  We walked over there, watching out for slicks of thick ice on the sidewalk, and when it was my turn to order, I asked if they had caramels in dark chocolate.  The very pretty young salesgirl said they did, and then asked me if I wanted the seesaw, or the regular.  I was suddenly dumbstruck, mentally envisioning an oddly-shaped confection, or perhaps something with a picture of a seesaw embossed on the chocolate.  I asked her what she would recommend, and she said she thought the seesaw was better, so I said that would be fine.  It was while she was packing my order that it dawned on me that she had been saying 'sea salt'.  I had to laugh.   

After we'd gotten to the car again, John said something about wanting to see the Boardwalk, and I misunderstood (is this a new trend, we wonder?) and thought he meant that he wanted to walk to the Boardwalk, so we did.  With the wind behind us, and a clear sky overhead, and the empty seaside resort looking like a sprawling, frigid bone yard - white, or pale blue, or bleached yellow buildings, with their white porches, white railings and spindles, balconies and window frames and doorways, all stark in the early afternoon light, without the usual quota of tanning tourists hanging about.  While we walked, we compared impressions of the service, and agreed that the one minister had been pretty much of a jerk -- he had even implied, if not actually stated, that the reason Doug used to make such fun of pomposity was because he himself was so pompous -- a jarring observation at the very least, that made me wonder if this person and I had known the same man.  John and I talked about the music he'd played.  We walked along the nearly deserted Boardwalk for a ways, marveling at the... pick a word: insanity; tenacity; stupidity; ballsiness... of one lone surfer, out in what must have been beyond frigid water, waiting for a wave.  Or sudden death by hypothermia.  Whichever comes first.

We agreed it was time to head back to the car.  Now the wind was in our faces, and it seemed as though the car was now twice as far away as it had been when we started this little jaunt.  My eyes were watering with the cold.  Obviously, we survived, and once we were thawed enough to bend, we got in the car and I drove us home.  Flirting with 80 all the way.                 
        
John napped a bit while I drove, which I always take as a great compliment.  Traffic was light, I was surprised at how narrow and badly-maintained that section of the famous Garden State Parkway actually is -- although there's work being done, to widen it a bit.  And there was, off on the landscape that was whizzing by, not a trace of snow.  Which would change, as we went north.

But I felt odd, in the car -- not tired, not drugged, not fuzzy, but odd.  That slight disconnect I've talked about, where I feel as though I'm just one step off to the side of my own experiences.  And, making this more disconcerting, that one step has placed me on unstable ground -- I feel as if I were standing at the very top of a heap of pea gravel, trying to maintain my footing, as the smooth little stones shift and roll away beneath my weight.  

And I'm still feeling that oddness (along with sweatiness and exhaustion from dealing with a driveway full of snow, on arriving at home), that sense of slowly falling all the time, but in such a way that those around me don't notice, because they just happen to catch me at a point, in my endless rotation, where I seem to be standing upright...  But this particular wooziness has, I think, a solid, concrete cause.  I tend to overlook the fact that, despite having known Doug for only about fifteen minutes, it seems, I am still grieving.

He was such a cheery little guy, who had what I think was a remarkable ability to laugh -- and to entice others into laughing with him -- at the very grave misfortunes that had befallen him, through no fault of his own.  He was, I think, the only person I've ever met who could do a vocal recap of how a particular organ performance had gone, mimicking the different stops, and the intonations, and the spluttering reverberations -- and all with a remarkably keen sense of robust enjoyment in the whole thing.  What a marvelous man he was -- a man who took the shards of his life, and rather than sinking into bitterness. instead worked with those shards as best he could, still looking for the biggest possible laugh, even if that laugh had to be at his own expense.

And now he's dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  Dead, ad infinitum.  Dead.  Criticize me if you like, but all the canonical rhetoric about the dead not really being dead, and life everlasting, and hanging about someplace that we the living can't see or hear or smell or taste or touch... leaves me not only cold and unconvinced, but angry.  I don't need some saccharine confection to distract me, and to strengthen an already too-eager propensity for denial.  I need whatever it would take, for me to face, with something like equanimity, the absoluteness of that final inhalation, that final hoarse gasp, that final silence  Dead, dead, dead. 

That's the center of this particular dislocation I experience -- the dizziness of the absoluteness of... one minute you are, the next minute, you aren't.  I have tried my very best to suspend my own skepticism, for years at a time, but at my core, I'm still left with dead, dead, dead.  And that cold feeling in my middle, as though a slice of my very self has been removed, and a sizable chunk of my vitality has been taken.

(Question for those who might have an answer: what good is eternity, for entities that basically aren't going to do or learn anything the whole time?  Or are there night classes we haven't been told about?  Harp repair?  Cloud maintenance?  Wing preening 101?) 

Next week, in Philadelphia, there will be another memorial service, for another friend -- this time, someone I'd known since my late teens, someone I'd been in love with, someone whose help and generosity literally saved my life.  And I'll be sitting in another church, while someone gets paid to ooze spiritual fondant, about life eternal, and Jesus, and mansions.  And I'll be sitting there, possibly toward the front, and I'll be thinking, 'Dead, dead, dead...'  I wonder if I'll be the only one. 


©    2013               Walter Zimmerman 

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