GOLDERS GREEN

         The sun is always out in my past. If I call up a remembrance, I must tell myself to put on my shades, which I never wear in real life. There were a few rainstorms in the memory, one in 1957 when one-year wonder Hurricane Hazle and the Milwaukee Braves put a hurt on Robin Roberts as the game went on through a downpour. Another came twenty years later when Tommy John proved a better mudder than Steve Carlton. I am sure in another year or two these games will transform themselves into puddles of sunlight.

         Glaring sunlight like the June day in 1953 when I sat on the steps outside Healy's Funeral Parlor on South 12th Street in Philadelphia. I was ten years old. I had already been inside to see Grandmom in her coffin. I could not hack it and had to sit on the stoop and wait for everyone to come out. I must have been hot; more than likely I was dressed in my Easter suit, but I did not care. Anything was better than going back inside.

         Dad would stop on the way home from the refinery to see his dying mother. She lived with his sister Ruth and Uncle Billy in a house on Moyamensing Avenue that years later, when high ceilings came back, people would have killed to own. To get there, Dad had to give up his ride home and take the "M" bus to Broad and Porter and walk the three blocks.

         Often his cousin Henry drove the bus for the PTC. Henry was "Henny" to Dad and Ruth but Henry to everyone else. After his visit, Dad would walk back to the Broad Street Subway, take it to City Hall, transfer to the Market Street El and ride that to the end of the line where he would then catch a bus home. He would give a report to mother and then go to sleep. We kids had to be quiet; Dad was working shift work.

         One day he reported her death in the same matter of fact way he did everything else in his life. A few days later we trooped down to South Philadelphia to Aunt Ruth's house and from there walked to Healy's. Dad and Uncle Billy kidded each other on the way. Dad pointed out the house in which he was born on Jessup Street. Uncle Billy wondered if they would put up a plaque. Dad retorted it would more likely be a plague.

         When the viewing was over, we got into cars for the ride to Fernwood Cemetery. The joking continued on the ride. I did not understand the reason for levity, but then I was young and stupid. Now I am older and just as stupid, but more an expert on the rites of funerals.

         The ride was not a procession like the one that left the funeral home in West Chester to take my brother Don to his cemetery in 1992. That one held up traffic where Route 3 met Route 202, but Don's had no Dad or Uncle Billy to tell jokes. Dad was still alive but did not seem to understand his son was gone and so he did not go. Maybe he wondered why burial was not at Fernwood. Don established his connection by working there as a gardener during the summers of the 1950’s.

         Dad's turn came six months later. He had been clever and had himself and my mother cremated. She had passed in 1983. There was a viewing. I can't recall if we took our seven-year-old daughter to it so she could sit on the stoop like her father did thirty years before. There was no procession. The internment was done privately after the viewing and the cremation. It was in the same Fernwood cemetery, but her niche was indoors in the mausoleum.

         Dad did not have a viewing. I made that decision. The father who would never let me try to fix his kitchen sink would have rebelled about having people visit. Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth did not travel by then. My sister had just moved nine hundred miles away and few others were still alive. Henny and his brother Freddy had died long ago. Their mother, Dad's Aunt Martha, died in 1958. That viewing was on a rainy night, so I did not sit outside at Healy's. She was buried with her sister, Wilhelmina, my Grandmom, in Fernwood.

         There was no need to joke on the drive to the cemetery for Dad. There was no drive. The funeral director had taken care of everything. When I visited the mausoleum, Dad was in his niche next to Mom, just around the corner from the King of Pork, as a resident was known, and down the hall from a Mafioso rubbed out in the underworld wars of the 1980s. I have wondered if that was Dad's last funeral joke.

         The same funeral director that attended Dad did the arrangements for the cremation of our daughter, killed in a senseless accident, in June 1989. She was thirteen. A viewing was held which turned into a mosh pit of friends trying to get near the open coffin. She was festooned with jewelry, tokens, and notes while Motley Crue played and adults sat sedately. The director closed the doors at ten o'clock that night. The friends sat outside until after two in the morning.

         When we picked up the remains, the director explained that, contrary to popular thought, the receptacle should not be opened and ashes scattered. We took possession of what I remember was a heavy box. We were to bury her privately. There was no procession of cars. Just an old Chevie station wagon that traveled to the Adirondack Mountains for burial in a glade in a forest on land owned by my wife's family. Later we saw deer nearby, apologetic that they were late for the service.

         Was it just one of Uncle Billy and Dad's jokes that the car split a hose on the way there and totally broke down, not to run again for a week, on the way back? I never had a chance to ask them, though both were alive and healthy at the time. Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth, nearly inseparable in life, passed on close together not that long ago. Their services were also private.

         Now, with her service over, I have one last single car procession to make to the mountains with my wife's ashes. This time I shall have to drive the hearse, be the gravedigger, and the mourner. A friend has offered to come along. What do I say to such kindness? I fear I shall end up sitting on the steps of the cabin, a half mile nearer the blue lake, in the bright sunlight, no smarter than before. What will she do then?

Valatie NY July 14, 2001