Visiting the graves Dec. 25, 2023
If all goes as planned, we’ll be off to see Pauly today,
even though he will have been dead since January 2020.
Perhaps thinking of Pauly made me take a tour of family
gravesites yesterday, buying flowers for each just as a possible final gesture,
since I’m one of the few family members who continue to visit them. I even
bought flowers for Peggy’s site, putting them against the Teddy Bear that
remains a fixture there despite many months of weather.
In some ways, a trip to each of these is a trip into Pauly’s
life, since many of my relatives (including my ex-girlfriend, Peggy) are buried
near our old stomping grounds in Passaic.
I drove to the florist first, knowing that for Christmas it
would be open, even though for most of the year it is closed on Sunday. I brought
five arrangements for each of the five graves, getting the florist to make up
one to stick on the wall of my mother’s above ground tomb. Then, I crossed the
street to the historic cemetery where my great grandfather and mother, my great
great grandfather and Ben and Florence are buried under a statue of John the Baptist
baptizing Christ.
Then, I went to the graveyard on the other side of town,
near the college, where Peggy is buried, along with the last members of her
immediate family. The 25th anniversary of her suicide is early next year, a terrible
memory he family had to live with, until they passed on by more natural means.
After this, I did laundry at the place where Pauly and I
used to go although long since greatly expanded. The Fotomat booth and the Quick
Chek were long gone, although the car wash remains and the gas station, and the
meeting of the two rivers behind it all.
Pauly worked at the Fotomat for about a year before he fled to
Western New Jersey. So, it was easy to envision him here as I bought coffee and
waited for my laundry to dry. After this, I drove to the graveyard in Paterson,
where most of my immediately family are entombed, my grandmother and
Grandfather in a grave with two of their four sons, my mother up in one of the
buildings. I spent a moment with each before heading down the hill to where
Alice and Pete were buried. Alice died young in 1975. Pete died in 2012, both
names covered with leaves I had to clear away as other people visited the
graves of their loved ones nearby.
I drove back through town, up to Hazel Road, then back along
Route 46 to Main Street, Christopher Columbus Junior High, the Clifton Library,
the White Castle and other icons of my youth still there, as is the old police
station where I was housed briefly before moving on to the county jail –
although it as long ceased being the police station or town hall.
The Clifton Theater is also long gone, knocked down and
replaced by a chain drug store, though many of the other buildings remained, including
the apartment where Fran lived for a time. Clifton Auto Store is still an auto
store though the letters above show only in the shadow they left from years posted
above the door.
Then, I was back into Passaic, downtown, passing where the
Capital Theater once stood, and the Central, and eventually the Montauk, all
gone, pieces of memory, and finally I drove back onto the highway for home, carrying
the baggage of all this memory on my back, wondering when the next time I will
visit there, knowing that today I will seek out Pauly’s ghost in a place he fled
to in his final days, sad, but important duty on a holiday we all used to
celebrate together.
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