24 November 2007

Let's Talk


Friday night on a holiday weekend. Big times in Big Pink. I wondered if I could stay awake to watch Ghost Whisperer and make it all the way through Moonlight. I like the Vampires on the latter show, since they are exceptionally well groomed and live so much better than the real-life versions.

Apparently if you are actually immortal, the compound interest thing works out pretty well, and can get you through unsettled times.

I could use some of that. I sat down in the brown chair, my legs aching, and the next thing I knew it was midnight. I traded the chair for bed, and the realm of dreams.

I had taken a walk up 50, east, along the traffic headed out to the County. There is so little daylight now that despite the early hour the sun was directly in the eyes of the drivers. I limped under the Blessing Jesus that towers over the road at the Thomas Moore Cathedral. The prow of his retaining wall had created a wind shadow against the chill gales of the last few days, and the leaves were piled thick and crackling under my shoes and Christ's benediction.

I passed the site of the new McDonalds restaurant and looked over at the pawn shop on the east side of Glebe, wondering if I should stop and see if there was a market for any of my junk. There was cash available there, and the Good Will two blocks south, where you can get tax credit for giving your stuff away free.

I have been on both sides of that, cash and tax deductions, and it is nice to have that sort of flexibility right in the neighborhood. I crossed Glebe with the light, and lumbered down the gentle hill to the rise at the Columbia Gardens cemetery.

This is the buttress end of Buckingham, where the garden apartments end and the little houses begin. It is virtually across the street from where the Army Spooks worked at Arlington Hall. With the leaves down, you can see the stately colonial lines of the main building across the eight lanes of concrete.

Route 50 slices the County in half just as effectively as a gigantic paper-cutter. It is a moat at this point, slashed deep in the earth to permit surface traffic on Glebe, and the hurtling cars give it a sizzling sound like frying bacon. If it had not been widened, the suburbs would never have been possible.

Nothing for a pedestrian to mess with, certainly. I thought about the dead man in front of Big Pink, and wondered what it was like for Rene Vaquez to live with the snarling road at his elbow, in his camp down at the bottom of the retaining wall, and what his plans had been for when the weather turned cold.

Didn't matter now, of course. I wondered if they had ever found his family, and what the County had done with his remains.

Back in the day, Route 50 was only two lanes, one east and one west, and there were traffic lights at the intersections. Cars stopped obediently where George Mason entered the formal entrance to the Buckingham neighborhood, and pedestrians could walk to work at the Hall without having a mad scramble across fifty yards of high-speed desolation.

I was puffing a bit as I got to the driveway to the cemetery. I had only been there once before, by car, when I was surveying the area for a place to live. I decided to walk that way and see if the monuments would take my mind off the ache radiating from my knees.

Columbia Gardens is thoroughly civilian, which is a change for me. Most of the dead with whom I interact regularly are military, and either reside, or are en route, Arlington. That is the Big League for eternity, and filled with more notables than you can shake a stick at.

I am on that route as well, or at least that is the half-assed plan for what remains of me, eventually. I wonder if I should spray paint something on the wall of my bedroom as a reminder to the Arlington County workers who will wind up carting me away.

I made a mental note, and then shrugged. Who cares?

But all around me was the evidence that people do. There were some wild and futuristic monuments near the sales office of the Thomas & Thomas Monument Company. They have a clear fashion sense in the funerary market, having operated out of the Gardens since the year that construction started on Big Pink.

The sign said that the Thomas's were graduates of the of the Elberton Granite Institute in Georgia, and specialized in both the latest technology and reverence for tradition.

They are the only memorial company in the area that specializes in the art of “hand-cut, V-tooled lettering,” with on-site diamond etching.

That was an impressive capability to have within walking distance of Big Pink, and there was a poster that showed their work for the notables at Arlington, which includes the Matthew Henson memorial that is now prominently placed in front of Admiral Peary on the bluff across from the Navy Annex side of the national cemetery.

Their handiwork was also clearly evident in the newer memorials at Columbia Gardens. I looked around for a while, noting that the older graves, near the office were mostly rugged Anglo-Saxon names. Towards the back are Germans and Hungarians, and then a wild mixture of South Asian, Muslim, Vietnamese and Ethiopian graves that register the waves of immigration.

I saw the work that the Thomas Company did for Francis Eugene Worley (1908-1974), born at Lone Wolf, OK. He served as the member of Congress for the 18th district of Texas, 1941-50, He resigned abruptly for reasons lost to stone, and died in Naples, FL. Why he is here, I don't know.

The other Congressman I could find on a cursory look was Charles Noel Crosby (1876-1951), who represented Pennsylvania's 29th District in the years they were building Buckingham. Ditto on the honorable Crosby; why not a plot in PA?

The light was dying and my knees hurt. The Gardens is a much smaller venue than Arlington, a neighborhood place, though large enough to occupy an hour's time when the sun is lowering and the leaves are heaped on the rippling ground.

I was looking for an exit that did not take me back to the whizzing traffic and came across an odd monument, a boulder, really, rough-hewn. It had a sort of ledge knocked into one end, and the name “Flynn” on the side. Small letters on the ledge spelled out “Sit down, Let's talk.”

I took him up on his offer, though kept my thoughts to myself. Mr. Flynn's bolder was cold, but it was good to get the weight off the legs.

From his plot I was surprised to see the number of Japanese graves, with the characters in Kanji. I have never met any Japanese people in the immediate area, but then I slapped my head. The dates on the stones- in western numbers- were just right for them owners to have been alive during the big Japanese language project at Arlington Hall, 1942-45, and there were many stones with Russian names inscriptions in Cyrillic.

They worked on many other projects at the Hall that required the skills of native Russian speakers and Eastern European language skills. I realized that this section of the cemetery was populated with fellow Spooks.

It made me feel at home, a little like Arlington. In time, I thanked Mr. Flynn for his hospitality. I briefly considered if I should contact Thomas & Thomas and make arrangements to provide a future service for visitors to the cemetery and put it aside.

The newer graves toward the back gate are largely Hispanic, and some of the markers are not of hard granite, but wood. Some are nicely crafted, and others rudely carved.

It seems as though the churches with their Spanish-speaking evening congregations must be providing a communal burial service for the indigent members of their community. I was too tired to look, but it is entirely possible that Rene Vaquez is in the Gardens somewhere, under a narrow wooden cross that simply that says: “In Ri.”

I gave way to a sedan filled with Indian women at the little circle at the back gate, and they waved with grave courtesy.

Outside the gate, the houses are modest brick, but with individual character, unlike the identical boxes of the ones in Arlington Forest on the west side of Big Pink.

Trudging up the hill past the tunnel under Route 50, the wind began to rise again, and the moon was rising at my back.

It was cold, but not bitter.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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