Ending up in the Church Yard Dec. 22, 2023

 

 

Almost four years after his passing, Pauly’s final resting place remains a mystery.

We might have known had 2020 been an ordinary year, but his death predated the pandemic, and because his friends and family needed time to put together a proper wake following his leaving this mortal coil in January 2020, they delayed a month, only to have the COVID lockdowns rob us of any memorial.

As time passed, the memorial appears to have become lost in the haze of other COVID deaths, and he joined all those whose passing largely went unmarked and then became less urgent, until finally, there seemed no reason to hold it after such a long time.

I haven’t forgotten, and with his birthday coming up next week, I feel the urgency to find where he is or where his ashes have been scattered, so I can continue the ritual of Christmas Eve we established as far back as 1970.

But those people who ought to know where he ended up are not responding, and those who I thought might care as much as we do seem uninterested in solving the mystery or finding him again.

We could go to Hank’s grave in Totowa as a token remembrance, but the heavy rains from last week have caused the Passaic River to overflow its banks in that neck the woods.

Hank, who died in 1995, is buried across the river from where Pauly was born and where Pauly met Garrick back in the early 1960s.

When I spoke to Garrick last about where Pauly ended up, he said he didn’t know, but he would try to find out. But now, he is on his way to Virgina for the holiday too remote for me to pursue him. I tried to contact Pauly’s sister (the most logical of that breed), but she has yet to get back to me. His musical friend and other sister had not responded either. Frank and Dawn, with whom we all spent countless Christmas Eves with, told me to talk to Garrick – they had no clue.

In the end, I’ll likely simply mark his birth early on our Christmas Eve trip to Asbury Park, finding an appropriate place along one of the lakes there to say my prayers for him.

All this is too morbid to consider in what is supposed to be a happy holiday, but it is important to me to remember and to reflect, whether it is in a place where Pauly’s spirit resides or in some place that I consider holy such as Asbury Park.

Either way, I’m sure Pauly’s spirit is around, haunting the world with his usual conspiracy theories such much of the hogwash about climate change and UFOs we heard from his lips while he was still living, a powerful presence in the universe that is still influencing us and our behavior.

I’m sure he and I would be arguing over the current conditions of the world, since he has long been an advocate for a philosophy diametrically opposed to mine, and yet, these would not be the kind of angry exchanges we find taking place in our society. Pauly had respect for those with whom he disagreed. The current crop of Woke respect nothing, except the gratification of their own egos and the illusion of their self-righteous belief they are making the world a better place to live in.

I miss Pauly. I miss his insane sanity that helped keep me focused.

I regret the fact that he never managed to achieve the greatness he deserved, just one more soul lost in Gray’s Church Yard, where most likely, I will also eventually end up.

Happy Christmas, Pauly, and Happy Birthday, too.

 


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