“It was maybe a month ago, and the town in the valley was filling with cars, bumper to bumper. So many leggings, jaywalking, and ditto, those engrossed in conversations with their cell phones. I don’t remember why I was there. Probably I’d been on a run for a new washer-drier combo, at Sears. Even the most stylish sales person, even the manager at Sears, is still making magic in outdated clothes. He didn’t have to sell me on the unit because I’d already bought it in my mind, whatever he was going to pitch me. I respect someone who would make a career out of working at Sears. I missed out on that option, and shot out of the starting gate wanting to be an actor, or backstage at the most prestigious festivals in Europe, or doing documentaries at the dockyard of General Dynamics. Not what happened. No, for every beautiful, out-of-the-box dream I had, some psychopath came weedling in to thwart me. I guess that’s a career, unto itself, that starts at birth, thanks to certain nature vs. nurture imbalances. But what happened to the eight foot tall laundry unit after leaving the parking lot at Sears, accompanied by lots of smiles from those who’d loaded it on board my Chevy, was less than epic. I still love the thing. The thing that caused me to ditch my broken washer and yet-functional drier, and put them out to pasture. That caused me to move it into position in my utility room, only to realize that its dual needs for water and venting, would not match my given infrastructure. With these frustrations, who would not go hang out in cemeteries. And so I veered right, before the turn by the old road house where skiers used to debauch, and went sharply uphill, engine whining, and tires losing purchase, onto the dusty dirt road. That expansive view going up, and the glimpses of a wrecked neighborhood bull-dozed by the enthusiastic newly rich against the ironic majesty of things you cannot wreck looming above, led me on. Places in Vermont pulsate with stuff that happened that you did, and are disconnected with now. Like that boyfriend who cajoled you to do his bidding, or the bear that crossed the road, or the dead end you hit, wishing you had your hiking buddy to go further down it. I’ve lost so much, damn it. And gained, and gained. But I know what’s buried, and what I stand on and for. I know that the ghost of a teenage boy killed but it doesn’t say why, yet his photographic face will forever grace a stone here, talks my language. I stand in front of him, wishing to Google him, wishing I’d only been there to help him not die. This is cemetery abattoir, and believe me, that word only just popped into my head. I will never think of any precious human as something to be “dealt with” in mafioso terms, and yet. where the young lie buried, one is struck with pain. As I found the gate of tumbled rock, amidst carefully sculpted granite markers, framed by trees, by ski mountains, by shifting clouds and the gods themselves, I wept and wondered how to enter. I stepped thru and then walked back the other way; then paused to consider what could possibly be hidden in the direction I wasn’t going. I’ll probably not be granted any kind of special compensation to see invisible things. Until its time, and I’ve emptied my heart. And let everything deemed non-essential, be real and become holy.”
