I've seen many collections of witty or telling epitaphs, and
I've known people who make a hobby of roaming cemeteries to find interesting
epitaphs. Sometimes they make rubbings of epitaphs that give funny or historically
enlightening send-offs, or that are on the gravestones of famous people. So
when my parents died - first my father and then two decades later, my mother -
I gave a lot of thought to epitaphs for them. I didn't want to simply have them
lying their labeled with their expiration dates.
I think I managed
distinctive, arresting summations for both, summations they'd probably
approve. But when I've visited at their separated graves (the cemetery didn't
have adjacent plots available), I've found no sign that anyone has ever come
over to take a rubbing. That's despite the fact that my father is in a
high-traffic, high-visibility area of the cemetery, in a spot my sister-in-law,
then a new mother, initially greeted with the enthusiastic relief of, "That's
great! It's near the washrooms!" But even though at least one of my
parents has such a prime location, no one ever seems to have noticed the
epitaphs. No one has ever contacted me to inquire further about their meaning
or applicability. So I'll tell the story of them here.
My father lies under the rather jaunty, enigmatic assertion:
The Bright Ones Can Stay
Home
That derived from an instruction one of my college
professors issued, and that became a byword and family joke among the three of
us. I didn't go away to college. I attended the school that had sprung up just
down the street from me. There, at what is now Chicago's Northeastern
University, my math teacher decided to have a review day for the students who
were still lagging.. She said that those who already knew the material needn't
attend that class session. Then, less tactfully, she rephrased her instruction
as, "The bright ones can stay home."
That had been the only major class I'd had that day, so I
indeed stayed home - the whole day. When my father saw me lounging about the
house, he was curious. He asked why I wasn't in class as usual. "Oh,"
I told him, "the teacher is having catch-up review. She said 'The bright
ones can stay home.'"
It was one of the few times I ever saw my father laugh with
genuine warmth - at something that wasn't simply the slapstick cruelty of a
Three Stooges gouge-in-the-eye. He was laughing at the alacrity, and perhaps
the downright chutzpah, with which I had assumed myself into that charmed
circle of "bright ones." My mother soon caught the hilarity of it. It
became a catch-phrase and family joke among us three. After that, whenever one
of us was spotted shirking a duty or simply lazing about when there was work to
be done, another of us was bound to chide, "The bright ones can stay home,
eh?"
When my father died, I thought of our family joke again and
realized it could have a larger encapsulating applicability for him. My father
had been quite a gad-about in his youth. He'd worked briefly for Al Capone,
designing and printing labels for the bottles of booze coming off Capone's
distillery assembly lines. My father had been a minor bootlegger himself,
greeted as the life of the party wherever he went. He partied all night, every
night. He was a high roller living the high life.
But by the time I came along, several decades later, he had
completely reversed course. His experience after the Roaring 20's dwindled to a
beaten growl soured him on people. As soon as Prohibition ended, he was persona
non grata among all his old pals. He realized how empty all those old
associations had been. They'd never wanted him - only the booze he brought. He
turned his back on going places and seeing people. He became something of a
hermit. He was content to stay home in the circumference of our family printing
business. Since we had our business attached to our living quarters, that meant
he hardly ever traveled farther than the little candy-and-cigarette store at
the end of our block.
Although he wouldn't have recognized or acknowledged any
"exotic" philosophy such as Buddhism, he in effect became an advocate
of the wisdom of staying home in contentment with and appreciation of whatever
a person had in the here-and-now. Unlike most youths who at least initially
want to fling themselves out into the larger world, I was generally disposed to
follow that more inner path myself. Oh, after high school, I would occasionally
become roused by a notion to go somewhere other. I once saw an invitation to
Americans to attend college in Japan and I actually started to make serious
plans. I got a book on the Japanese language and made lists of "things to
take."
My parents would have supported any decision I made, but my
father was a little deflating. He wondered why I would want to go all the way
to Japan when there was still so much of Chicago I hadn't seen. When I would
argue my case in favor of Japan, he would say, "Yes, but have you seen
55th and Halsted?" I really don't think he knew or had any interest in
what was at that particular Chicago intersection. I think he just chose the
spot at random, perhaps because that conjunction of number and name had a
certain poetic ring to it.
I groaned, and continued to champion the advantages of
Japan, but much more feebly. I could see his point. In the end, and with quite
some relief at not having to go through the trouble of packing and departing, I
did stay home and happily attended the college in my neighborhood. But
"55th and Halsted" became another catch-phrase in our household,
advanced whenever one of us started to entertain some infatuation with the
far-flung, instead of pursuing a more deep, abiding familiarity with our own
home ground.
So in the end, "The Bright Ones Can Stay Home"
seemed the most apt way to summarize my father's last, best philosophy of life.
I'm not as pleased with the epitaph I finally settled on for
my mother. It too has a certain summary aptness, but it has a cynical, sour
cast that perhaps shouldn't be a person's parting shot to the world. I often
think of having her stone re-carved with a more upbeat afterthought, but in the
end, her stone will probably remain as it is.
My mother majored in languages at Northwestern University
(which is east of the misnomer Northeastern I attended). She especially enjoyed
her Spanish classes and the classical Spanish poetry that was assigned reading.
She memorized some of the stanzas of Romantic poet Adolfo Becquer, and
remembered them. In lieu of lullabies she would soothingly recite them to me
years later when I was a child….
"Volveran las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a tus crystals -
jugando llamaran."
Freely translated, that says, "The black doves will
come to hang their nests on your balcony and will once again call to you,
playfully tapping with wing on your windows."
I was moved almost to tears just a few years ago when
(against anything my father would have wholly approved), I took a whirlwind
tour of Spain. Our guide was a young woman, seemingly barely out of college. So
I had no hopes of her having any familiarity with Bequer or with the Spanish
writers my mother studied in the 1920's. But I was wrong! The young guide lit
up the moment I mentioned Becquer's name - and she immediately started to
recite in unison with me his poem about the lost love to which the doves were
witness. When my mother died, I thought I would never hear those lines again -
or in fact meet anyone with any memory of them. It certainly would be hard to
find any young Americans who could recite whole poems by classic poets so
readily ("The Dead Poets Society" notwithstanding). But perhaps they
take a different educational approach in Spain - one that puts a slightly
nationalistic emphasis on honoring their noted writers, even from centuries
past, with remembrance of their words.
However, it was the last line of this Becquer poem, this
"Rima" from the 19th century, that my mother invoked most often, not
as lullaby but more as lesson. The English translation of that last line reads
roughly, "Disenchant yourself of the idea that anyone will ever love you
as I have loved you."
That might seem a cruel, even a psychotic thing to say to a
young girl who is so eager, so hopeful of finding romantic love in the world. I
can see any psychiatrists who might read this shaking their heads in dismay at
what they'd probably interpret as signs of a Norman Bates mother with a
cripplingly jealous attachment to her child. But it wasn't like that at all.
Well, perhaps there was just an iota of self-concern in my
mother's occasional interjection of this bitter line from an old poem. She had
a mild form of agoraphobia and doubtless was afraid that I would leave her, and
she would have to struggle out into the terrifying world on her own.
But for the most part, she was just putting into words what
I myself could perceive but might be too dangerously needy of companionship to
acknowledge. She might mutter the words when she saw me inclined to pursue an
indifferent youth who came late to our date, who honked his car horn hurrying
me out to him rather than bestirring himself to come up to the door, and who
gave every sign of only grudgingly buying me dinner if he was assured of my
delivering what he inevitably wanted. Looking at this parade of calculating,
appraising peers, I had to admit what so many foolishly refuse to admit - that
unconditional love will be hard to find once you move outside the sphere of
good parents. "Oh yes, he slaps me around, but I know that deep down, he
really loves me." I was impressed with the destructive illogic of any such
attitude early in life, by the reminder of the line from Becquer's poem.
The line might just as well have been delivered by my mother
to the world at large though. She did everything effusively for free, while
others were always bent over their calculators, figuring what they'd charge.
She excitedly considered every potential guest as a State event - while, at
best, they squeezed her in between other appointments. Little did they know how
much they meant to her as they hurried out the door on their way to somewhere
else.
So there her epitaph is carved, hiding its rue behind the
original Spanish which I thought it unlikely any relative could decipher and
resent:
Como yo te he querido,
desengáñate - así - no te querrán
Then how about me? I think I might have settled on my own
epitaph. Once again, it's a line provided by someone else. It was suggested to
me years ago by Stuart Brent, Chicago's famous bookseller. Brent had his little
shop, which often served as salon for the literati, on Michigan Avenue, part of
the City's "Magnificent Mile." He became one of the last independent
booksellers, holding his own against the chains, the mega-bookstores, and the
warehouse operations. He did it by maintaining his personal interest - in every
book and every customer.
Sometimes his habit of voicing his own, often crusty,
opinions about his customers' reading preferences ran contrary to what most
merchants would consider good business sense. When an acquaintance of mine once
failed to find L. Ron Hubbard's then best-selling Dianetics anywhere in
the store, he rather accusingly asked Brent why he didn't stock such a popular
book. Brent roundly rebutted that he didn't want pseudo-scientific drivel like
that taking up room on his shelves. However Brent finally relented and agreed
to order a copy to satisfy my friend's persistent desire to read "that
hack junk." Another, even more antagonistic exchange occurred when Brent
called my friend to tell him his order was in, and my friend informed him that
he hadn't been able to wait - that he had already bought the book elsewhere. In
the wake of the verbal abuse that Brent then dished out, my friend never
patronized Brent's store again in its fifty-plus years of existence.
I never quite made it plain, but frankly, I was on Brent's
side in this scuffle. I felt on Brent's side in most things. While many of my
peers were swooning over the Beatles, I became a Stuart Brent fan. He had a
local weekly TV show devoted to book reviews. My mother and I would both watch
the show faithfully.
If pinned down, we would have to admit that all his reviews
sounded much alike. Whether he was reviewing what was then the latest book of
social critique, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, or whether he was reviewing a classic such as Eliot's Middlemarch
- Brent would trot out pretty much the same observations. He would simply use
whatever book he selected for his morning talk as a hook on which to hang his
dissatisfactions with modern society.
Brent would even work the same phrases into most of his
reviews. He was sure to find in each book-of-the-week some support for his
blasts against "mass culture," "group-think," and our
current educational system intent on producing merely "educated
fools." My mother and I, as alienated as we were from popular culture,
reveled in these criticisms.
If Brent couldn't find direct support for his contrarian
views in whatever book was under discussion, he would freely go off on a
tangent. He always introduced these tangents in the same way. He would preface
any digression with the fetching admission - "Apropos of nothing…"
Thinking back on those old TV reviews, I realized that
Stuart Brent had handed me my epitaph on a platter. I've never really had a
job, and certainly not a career. My school attendance was desultory at best
since I mostly learned at home. Therefore, I've never felt had any strong
affiliation with a school, a class, a team. I've never attended any religious
services. I have mostly eschewed collecting things or having a hobby of any sort.
I've generally lived beyond the pale, completely irrelevant to the worldly
doings and lives of others. So the phrase will suit me perfectly:
Here lies Marlene Vorreiter
Apropos of Nothing
