Cities of Dust (and bones)
Cities of Dust - a love story.
Ever since I was a kid I have thought of cemeteries as being cities of dust. My Gran used to take me to help her tend my Grandfather's grave when I was small. It always seemed to be Easter when we went. Maybe we went other times, but I can't recall it ever being another time of year so maybe that was when he died; I'm slightly ashamed to say I don't know even to this day. I guess that losing my Mum when I was too young to remember anything about her might have given me an outlook that didn't attach too much significance to the actual dates of such things, who knows?
I used to run up and down the gaps between the graves when I got bored with Gran's clipping and pruning, until she got mad and yelled at me to stop being so disrespectful. It didn't seem disrespectful to me, the lanes between the graves were just right for playing in, with large roads and intersections for me to cart imaginary lorry loads of goods along.
The variety of grave styles never ceased to impress me, particularly the ones with layers of frosted glass fragments on them, which I thought of as being precious gemstones. I would fill my pockets with different coloured glassy pieces, hoping to get away with sneaking them home to play with, but I was always ordered to turn my pockets out and return everything to their rightful places before we left to go to the bus stop.
As I played, I would find myself gradually being drawn further and further away from my Grandfather's plot, past my aunts and great-uncles last resting places, and into unfamiliar territory, where people had names other than Williams or Boswell. There seemed to be no end to the population of this city, and I would sometimes vaguely wonder what the citizens did when they got bored with simply lying around in their neat little walled off plots. Coloured glass or no, there had to be some limit to the amount of resting-in-eternal-bliss a body could go along with.
One sunny autumn day, years later, when we buried my Gran there too, I found my dad kicking leaves away from old family graves, thinking about who-knows-what when he should have been shaking hands with the mourners, little knowing that he was only five months away from his own neat little plot there. I wish now that I'd asked him what was on his mind, but what can you do? You can't know what you don't know - as the old feller himself was so fond of saying.
As I grew older and lost friends to motorcycles and needles, I became a regular up at the old cemetery, even going there at night from time to time when I couldn't sleep, to stand at the gates with my head pressed against the ironwork in the darkness. It really wasn't that I was being morbid, at least, I don't think so. It was just that I could never reconcile the vibrant living personalities still so clear in my mind with the conspicuous and painful absences from my everyday life. I felt sure that if I tried often enough then sooner or later I would feel the presence of one of them from beyond the grave. How could everything simply stop, just because of a heart attack or motorcycle accident?
That's where I met the love of my life - in the City of Dust that had become so familiar to me over the years.
Ever since I was a kid I have thought of cemeteries as being cities of dust. My Gran used to take me to help her tend my Grandfather's grave when I was small. It always seemed to be Easter when we went. Maybe we went other times, but I can't recall it ever being another time of year so maybe that was when he died; I'm slightly ashamed to say I don't know even to this day. I guess that losing my Mum when I was too young to remember anything about her might have given me an outlook that didn't attach too much significance to the actual dates of such things, who knows?
I used to run up and down the gaps between the graves when I got bored with Gran's clipping and pruning, until she got mad and yelled at me to stop being so disrespectful. It didn't seem disrespectful to me, the lanes between the graves were just right for playing in, with large roads and intersections for me to cart imaginary lorry loads of goods along.
The variety of grave styles never ceased to impress me, particularly the ones with layers of frosted glass fragments on them, which I thought of as being precious gemstones. I would fill my pockets with different coloured glassy pieces, hoping to get away with sneaking them home to play with, but I was always ordered to turn my pockets out and return everything to their rightful places before we left to go to the bus stop.
As I played, I would find myself gradually being drawn further and further away from my Grandfather's plot, past my aunts and great-uncles last resting places, and into unfamiliar territory, where people had names other than Williams or Boswell. There seemed to be no end to the population of this city, and I would sometimes vaguely wonder what the citizens did when they got bored with simply lying around in their neat little walled off plots. Coloured glass or no, there had to be some limit to the amount of resting-in-eternal-bliss a body could go along with.
One sunny autumn day, years later, when we buried my Gran there too, I found my dad kicking leaves away from old family graves, thinking about who-knows-what when he should have been shaking hands with the mourners, little knowing that he was only five months away from his own neat little plot there. I wish now that I'd asked him what was on his mind, but what can you do? You can't know what you don't know - as the old feller himself was so fond of saying.
As I grew older and lost friends to motorcycles and needles, I became a regular up at the old cemetery, even going there at night from time to time when I couldn't sleep, to stand at the gates with my head pressed against the ironwork in the darkness. It really wasn't that I was being morbid, at least, I don't think so. It was just that I could never reconcile the vibrant living personalities still so clear in my mind with the conspicuous and painful absences from my everyday life. I felt sure that if I tried often enough then sooner or later I would feel the presence of one of them from beyond the grave. How could everything simply stop, just because of a heart attack or motorcycle accident?
That's where I met the love of my life - in the City of Dust that had become so familiar to me over the years.