Section 21, CMG

I found a new place for nearby bike riding: the Cleveland Memorial Gardens.  Just a quick hop over to Harvard Green and I have acres of flat dry roads unhampered by people.  At least living people, that is.

The Cleveland Memorial Gardens is one of our city's low-cost cemeteries.  Preparing for and conducting a burial with a raised stone marker costs 850 dollars, a flat stone plot is significantly less.

I know it might seem sacrilegious for me to ride my bike through this sacred ground, but trust me, I'm thinking prayerful thoughts when I am there.  I wonder about the trenchlike burial rows.  A long line of a dug up dirt -- fifteen to twenty small stake markers -- and then, in line with that trench, an area that's been dug but not filled.  I wonder who is in this line of unmarked graves.  I wonder who will be next, who'll fill up the remaining empty slots.

This afternoon, a woman pull out a plastic bin of gardening tools and a gardening bench, then sat down and started to comb over a gravesite with a spade, loosening the grass that had grown over the stone.  It was hard work.  She threw clump after clump of dirt into a pile, then she poured bleach onto the flat stone and began to rub the engraved name with a bristled brush.  I do not know who this person was to the woman.  Husband, mother, child.  Someone important, for sure.  She needed the name to be seen, remembered.  This was no tidying; it was a far more serious a task.  Almost like if God couldn't see the name shining, the person never counted.

A man in an old Mercedes parked by an area, then, after a long while, got out with a blue "Happy Birthday" mylar balloon and a sleeve of yellow daisy mums.  The wind was furious today, and during several of my laps around the grounds, I saw him trying to figure out what to do so that the balloon would not scream away in a gust.  He stood on the balloon's string while he tried to kick an indentation into the soil so that he could bury the balloon's tail.  He worked and worked just as strenuously in his section as the woman was working in section 21.  It was killing me.  And even though I did not know whose birthday it was, I damn sure wanted that person to get the ballon.

I stopped riding near the back of the development, picked up a softball sized rock and rode the half mile back to him.   "Sir," I cautioned, handing him the stone.  He said thank you, and turned to go back to work. Then he shouted out, through the wind to my back as I was walking away, "Thank you so much."   It was so small, this exchange between us, just a tiny bit of sacred.  Like communion.  This, the rock of love, given to you.  This, the stone of salvation.

Here's the thing I learned today: I will have lived a fine, fine life if someday I am buried in a Potter's Field and someone cares enough about me to scrub my marker clean.  And I will have been loved more than enough if someone, still dressed in Sunday church clothes, swings by to tell me happy birthday, a shiny bright balloon in tow.  Love just keeps on loving, doesn't it?  Long after life is done.