At the foot of your grave/I planted our black phone …
I wait for the lawn to ring …
expecting the steady/dial tone of your voice.
—Matt Rasmussen
Each year we return, performing a family ritual, laying a wreath on ordinary worn earth. Create evergreen circles of constructed joy and remembrance stuck with pine cones and holly berries, tied with ribbons. Each time we do, the 365 days or so since the last visit seem to increase, to move us further away towards some other altered landscape. The silent prayers, or what have become mental small talk conversations with the dead grow dimmer, less vividly imagined, stretch the immeasurable distance, as if we were struggling to write a story or trying to hold the thread of a dream upon awakening as the content vaporizes, a little quicker with each attempted recall.
The kids are taller, all having reached their full heights, more defined people with each visit. It is not unusual to think of them in these recent years as perhaps measuring our slowing pace, estimating the increased angle of our stoop when we place and tie the wreaths. And then they politely maneuver around us up the six- or seven-foot grassy incline from the curb to the headstone saying, “It’s fine, we’ll tie it; we’ll do it.” The mind wanders during the several moments of silence at each separate grave. Calculations of how long it will take to get to the restaurant when we’re done intrude and compete for thought time with solemnity flush against the smooth gray, early-winter-cold stone.
Back in the car, the heater blasting and my window half-open, we are more likely to notice the posted new hours wire-tied to the entrance gate than the neglected plots whose final dates often end back well into the last century. Grave sites that have seen few fresh or plastic flowers, candles, small rocks, notes, and/or seasonally appropriate decorations since men first walked on the moon. Flags are the only regular additions. It was well before 9-11, before computers rewrote the world, when other visitors, so many surely departed years ago, from unknown distances and abandoned neighborhoods and times, still came by.
The dead return as they should now, as we stare, heads lowered, eyes fixed upon the frozen earth of their homes, the view blurring well beyond the cemetery. Alive and noisy with politics and laughter, business and gossip, comments floating between English and Italian, Russian and Polish, brogues and mysterious accents as thick as the witnessing clouds holding steady over us. Stuffing their warming faces with familiar food and their long-faded present.
The phantom smells of pastries and warm bread, pierogi and sauce covered macaroni, of strong night-black coffee sweetened with Anisette and sweet liqueurs, whiskey, brandies, flavored and not, are layered in an ascending, spiraling evaporation overhead off overworked stoves and overflowing dining room tables. Their seductive collective breath presses against slightly opened steam-opaqued kitchen windows; it coats the skin and clothes of the living standing in remembrance of completed lives, known or only imagined from stories. These apparitional visitors lend the countenance of their expressions to the December red faces of children they’ve never met. As we leave the cemetery, I want to say to them, but merely think to myself, the fashions of ghosts never go out of style.
* * *
When we enter the restaurant, the double doors to the kitchen are swinging, held in an uncanny repetition opening and closing regularly, keeping time to an aromatic metronome. For a moment I think that if I peer through and well beyond the small glass rectangular windows on the doors, I will see my father 40 years ago walking in uninvited and through another door to speak to his old friend Bruno, the chef-owner, as he did every time we went out to eat there. And when he returned to our table, he would tell us again, as he did each time we went there, how when his mother died in 1958, Bruno sent over so much food (including items not on the menu) to the house that my mother didn’t cook for a week.
And he would then recount how another lifelong friend, 6’5” Big Bill the Dutchman, his mechanic forever, offered him his personal long black Cadillac. (And I think may have even asked one of his employees, Little Nicky the Mailman, to be the chauffeur [I’m not sure] for my grandfather, father, and my uncles on that dark December day so many years ago).
Now I fill my grown children with stories I’ve told them 1,000 times before, gently embellishing the retellings with each offering’s evolution. But this year they pay a little more attention to the tales as the plot has grown by two occupants, the final family members to rest there having returned to the city of their birth since our last Christmas visit. Or perhaps they just listen more closely to calm and soothe my own growing melancholy that I’ve tried to hold at bay with thoughts of their present and future lives until they are telling stories whose dark pain will have lightened into comfort with the years.
Anthony DeGregorio’s writing has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Libre, Abandoned Mine, Italian America Magazine, Aromatica Poetica, Bloom, Nowhere, Wales Haiku Journal, Polu Texni, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, Paterson Literary Review, Light—A Journal of Photography & Poetry, and The Maine Review.
