Mission, Part A, Accomplished

These volunteer sweet peas were growing where the house that my father shared with his brother in Balmorhea, Texas used to be. They made me think of my mother, who grew beautiful, beautiful, sweet peas -- my favorite flower -- in the yard of our family home in Southern California.

We walked a few blocks looking for the house... doubting ourselves and then shaking our heads. It should be right here on one of these two blocks... a corner lot... the big pecan tree in the front yard.

We ran into the local Justice of the Peace, who told me that he knew "Popeye" (my father's childhood nickname) very well. But none of the people I knew are still in Balmorhea, the small west Texas town where my father grew up and passed away -- with a roughly 40-year stay in California in between.

I really wanted to visit Balmorhea one more time. My mother and my brother Mark's ashes are nowhere, or everywhere (depending on how you want to look at it). But my father is somewhere... he's in the cemetery in Balmorhea... and even though I'm not a sentimental person, and I believe that death is the ultimate period-at-the-end-of-the-sentence-story-over X-out... I wanted to go there.

We turned right at Victor's gas station and started the short drive into the country (there's just a little bit of town and whole lot of country there), to the cemetery. I recognized soooo many names in that cemetery: Pittman, Kingston, Crenshaw... they were the names of my childhood dinner table, from my father's stories.

There was something unexpected at my father's headstone:

Someone had piled stones at his headstone, and placed an aluminum foil wrapped Maxwell House coffee can. There were incense sticks in the can... as if someone had come there many times and burned incense for my father. I didn't see anything similar on anyone else's grave

I have no idea who it was, but I'm glad they did.

In the months following my mother's death, my dad and I would sit up together. One night he told me that he had been lonely every day of his life before marrying my mother. He said that he thought I'd understand -- that he figured I was a lonely person, too. And I was.

He's next to his parents and sister, my Aunt Helen. There are wildflowers in the cemetery. And scrub, of course, and hard-packed ground... roadrunners and rabbits and in the distance there are hills. It may be a cliche, but it was peaceful. Eric and I each placed a pretty polished rock on his grave. I'm very, very, happy that we were there.

I carry my father with me in my chin & fingers & toes, in the way I describe the world, in the root of the stories I tell.