Recently, a legion of friends, working behind the scenes, organized a cemetery clean-up. It was a Great Day of Service but not without humor. Observing 120 people pulling weeds and discarding faded flowers, I rode up and down the cemetery roads in a John Deere Gator to cheer on the workers and to retrieve their filled trash bags. When I stopped by the live oak tree, my friend Stan shouted, “Is that a beer wagon?”
I tossed him a bottle of water and yelled back, “Nope, but here’s something that won’t cause you to say things that you’ll regret later.”
Barbara is a registered nurse and she spent the morning tidying up her family’s plot, as well as adjacent areas. She leaned her elbow on her hoe handle after whacking weeds all morning and said, “It’s amazing---I can work here all day; and if I make a mistake, nobody dies.”
But I wonder whether all of the dearly departed liked each other. Take the double headstone at the same cemetery. The ribbon tag across the top says TILL WE MEET AGAIN MAMA. On the left is the wife’s information, including dates of birth and death. Over the husband’s side is simply: I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU. (If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.)
Every time I get the sniffles, my kids lovingly hire a gardener to tend to my plot. When I later check it out, I immediately perk up. It works better than penicillin. We don’t put too much credence in the dates carved on the headstones, though. We Texas women tend to lie about our age---even when we’re gone. Rosetta Rhubarb, who always had a thing for younger men, made a complete fool of herself by knocking off five years. We died laughing when we saw the headstone, because, if anybody looked her age, it was Rosetta Rhubarb.
Our cemetery is so sacred to the memory of our deceased relatives, friends, and former school teachers, that we might be up in arms if a high-school beauty queen posed in front of one of our prestigious graveyard monuments for her graduation picture. Our matriarchs and patriarchs might shudder at the thought that similar sacrileges might one day be committed on their own graves. On second thought---It might be a beautiful way to salute our ancestors and give them what they deserve:
“Pomp and Circumstance.”