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Imagine You Are Driving

Imagine you are driving.

You are driving on one of the most congested freeways, in one of the most populated cities, in a state known for congested freeways and populated cities.  Imagine your drive a lot.

Imagine you are driving during the prime morning commute hours. And imagine you are smart. Imagine you drive this freeway five days a week and you know which lanes tend to move and which lanes don’t.  So imagine you are moving, slowly, but moving in the far right lane so imagine you are  not moving quite as slow as the rest of the lanes of drivers.  Imagine you are in the lane that moves just a little faster, and gives you a close-up, if fleeting, view of the curiosities that occupy the no-man’s land that makes up the side of your city’s freeway.

Imagine you know this isn't quite a no-man's land.

Now imagine you see something strange, something curious, but something not necessarily out of the ordinary.  It is not out of the ordinary because you see lots of strange things, and even more as you move slowly along a freeway.  Imagine this strange thing is a black Weber grill poised in a slightly protected triangle of concrete.  Imagine this triangle of concrete is covered by an overpass above and formed on one side by a wall, and on the other two sides by steel barriers so that it forms a tidy, protected, concrete and steel triangle. 

Now imagine in this tidy triangle,

Next to this Weber grill,

There is a green, plastic lawn chair.

And imagine next to this green, plastic lawn chair this is a beer cooler.

And imagine, on this green plastic lawn chair, next to this black Weber grill, and this beer cooler, sits a lone beer can.

As if, your neighbor Mike decided to cook out, and while he was cooking out, he decided bring out a beer cooler, and to have a beer, and sit on a green plastic lawn chair.

Except,

Your neighbor Mike does not have cookouts on the side of the freeway.  Your neighbor Mike does not place his grill in a tidy cement triangle, bring out his beer cooler, pop open a cold one, and grill up a few burgers as the cars try, unsuccessfully, to whiz by.  Your neighbor Mike does not create this strange tableau of pseudo-suburban domesticity on a protected  concrete triangle, next to a tightly packed legion of vehicles that is his little patch of the 5 freeway.

But someone does.

Feminine loveliness

Western Colorado

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Sent from my iPhone

Georgetown, Colorado Masonic Hall

Georgetown, Colorado

Victorian in Georgetown, Colorado

The Broad - through the elevator roof

The Adrianna's

Getting the Grandparents in the Ground

Getting the Grandparents in the Ground

It should have been a straightforward route to the cemetery, finally.  But Grandma Peggy and Grandpa Tex had a different path in mind.  They wanted a trip through the old neighborhood and a traffic jam and Waze obliged.

I had been to the cemetery many times in my quest to get my grandparents ashes interred. Each time I took the same route.  The 605 South to the 91 West, exit at Downey Road and take it down straight nearly to what I call Sunnyside Cemetery, because that is what it was called when I was a kid.  But this day, the day after so many years, so much consternation on the part of my mom and so many weird push-me-pull-you unargued arguments and what-to-do- with-the-ashes-conversations I was going to get them interred.  They were on their way to their final resting place.  They just wanted to visit the neighborhood one more time.

My Grandmother, Peggy, died shortly after I got married. That was about 18 years ago.  My Grandfather, known as Tex, lived for about another five years.  They had made no plans for burial.  They had only decided to be cremated but made no specific requests for their ashes. I remember something about scattering their ashes in the High Sierra’s – but maybe I’m making that up. Both of their parents were buried in Sunnyside Cemetery in Long Beach, but my Grandmother was unhappy with her mother’s burial, actually she was unhappy with the cost of adding her mom’s name to the plaque that her parent’s grave shared.  Grandma Peggy believed the addition of her mom’s name had been paid for at the time the plot was purchased and she didn’t have the heart, or maybe the breath, to fight the cemetery over the issue. Subsequently, my great-grandmother’s name had never been added to her grave, until this year when I added it as part of the great “get the grandparents in the ground” initiative of 2016.  It would have been so much easier if they had made the plans themselves but they didn’t. They left that to their wishy-washy family. 

Back to Tex and Peggy… they married when my mom was about five years old. Both had previous impetuous war-time marriages.  My grandfather had two boys that were being raised on the East Coast that he didn’t get to see. He adored my mother, who had looks like Shirley Temple, missed his own children, and was happy to be a father again. My grandmother was happy to find a stable family- oriented man unlike my biological grandfather who was a good-time Charlie in her book (he was a sweet wonderful man – they were just ill-suited).  So Tex and Peggy had a great post-war marriage, a Southern California stucco box of a house and one more child together that came five years later, my Uncle Blair.  Blair was one of the cogs in the problem of finding a place for the ashes.  Blair was a 50s kid.   Red haired, sweet, and close to his parents.  He was the second impediment to the wandering ashes. The first impediment was my grandfather’s cheapness and then his attachment to my grandmother’s ashes.  Everyone wanted the ashes near them, except my mom and her Aunt Juanita who wanted them in the cemetery.

My grandmother’s ashes first lived on my grandfather’s dresser. They sat in a plain metal box, with a little doily on top. My grandpa would kiss his fingers and then touch them to the box. He would talk to the box.  He wasn’t ready to let them her go and so he wasn’t ready to let her ashes go either.

When Tex passed, his ashes were placed in a similar metal box with the one exception of having a dollar bill taped to the top so we knew “who was who”. Now the metal boxes sat on my Uncle Blair’s dresser. My mother was very upset about this. She is the eldest child and believed she should have had some say in the matter, but as with most disagreements with her brother, she could not directly tell him this upset her.  She instead internalized it, told me about it, acted passive-aggressive about it, and was generally disagreeable on the subject. 

Uncle Blair’s time with the ashes wasn’t really that long. He became ill too and passed away. For some reason, instead of my mom then getting the ashes they went to my Aunt Sharon, Blair’s ex-wife who was always very close with my grandmother.  This further bothered my mom, although no one  knew this.  There is no judgement passed on my aunt, I’m quite sure my mom never said “I want them back”.  It took me telling my cousin so she could tell her mom. And in all fairness I wanted my mom to be able to make a decision about this.  Eventually the ashes got passed back to mom at a family picnic.  There were those metal boxes again and this time they only made it as far as my mom’s car. They sat on the floor of my mom’s old Honda CRV, driving where she drove, along with all the other crap that my mom never took out of the car. For some reason one day I looked down and saw them, I wasn’t driving in the car, probably just retrieving something and said “what are those boxes?” and she said “those are Mom and Dad”.    More wishy-washy family stuff.  She finally got them and she couldn’t deal with it either – she couldn’t even take them out of her car.

Now comes 2016. The year my Grandpa Tex’s sister, my great-aunt Juanita, passed away. The year we moved my mom to Colorado to an apartment near my sister and the year of dealing with all the crap undealt with in more than 20 years of family indecision. While making arrangements with Sunnyside for my great aunt’s Juanita’s grave my mom reminded me that her grandmother Opal’s (Grandpa Peggy’s mom) name had never been added to her grave marker.  I talked to a person there about fixing this and while I was at it I asked my sister if she would share the cost of placing the grandparents to rest.  Bless my wonderful sister, she was in for the whole program. It wasn’t easy. The State of California doesn’t let you stick a plain metal box in a grave and call it a person. They want proof of the stuff in the box, like death certificates and notarized documents by next of kin. Hence the many trips to the cemetery. I had the route down after so many Saturdays of meeting a very kind woman to sign this or that, turn in this or that, or look at this or that, that when I hit traffic on my way to actually getting the grandparents in their grave, that I had to check with Waze for route that would get me there on time so I could witness this thing finally happening.

I felt, and I believe rightly so, that after being incredibly patient, after experiencing the cemetery telling me that my great grandparents were not buried there (they weren’t in the database transfer from Sunnyside to Forest Lawn), of paying for two graves in one year, of paying to fix the cement slab that my great grandparents plaque lay on in order to get Opal’s name added to her plaque and paying for a new plaque that I deserved to be present when my grandparent’s boxes where actually placed in their vault without paying yet another fee.  I fought and cajoled and got my way to witnessing this without having to pay an extra $500 dollars for the privilege. And that is why I needed to be there on time. I think Tex and Peggy created the traffic jam that made me search out another route with Waze which directed me on the nostalgic tour.

This is how Waze told me to go:

1)     exit the 91 freeway at Bellflower Boulevard. This is the street on which my Grandma Peggy’s parents had a dry-cleaning store - “Bellflower Cleaners” – the same store that she lived in the back of as a kid until they found a house a few blocks away.  We had spent countless hours together on this street shopping at the western store, eating at the Woolworth’s counter, visiting my great-grand parents.  The old store and house were about a mile from the freeway exit.

2)      Next Waze sent me down Bellflower Boulevard, past the giant donut-in-the-sky donut shop (like Randy’s Donuts by LAX) we went to when I was a kid and the fabric store we frequented pouring over pattern books and material.

3)      Waze then had me turn right on South Street which ran on the south side of their old neighborhood – the neighborhood my mom and Uncle Blair grew up in. 

4)      Waze then told me to turn left at Lakewood Boulevard -  this was the corner that housed Bob’s Big Boy – my favorite childhood restaurant. The corner of many chocolate shakes with my Grandmother.  It also sent us down past the laundromat my grandmother went to weekly, past the Lakewood Mall where we ate Sunday night suppers at Clifton’s Cafeteria before church and bought special occasion clothes at the Bullocks department store. 

          Waze took me past their entire California lives.  I was kind of cry-laughing the entire trip. I felt touched beyond the grave, mischievously guided on one last ride.  I felt them both with me there and not just as ashes in metal boxes moved from dresser to house to car and beyond.  But as incredibly special people to me that were saying goodbye to their earthly lives and to their eldest grandchild.   

2016 has been a challenging year but a great year. A year for saying goodbye and putting old issues to rest. Of honoring my ancestors and putting things right. I placed those plain metal boxes in the vault and on each one I sat little statues that were the likeness of my grandparents – Peggy is at her sewing machine and Tex is reading in his chair. I put a young picture of them together and a later life picture of them together. And there is even room left in that vault for my mom for when her time comes so I don’t have to face this decision again.  The grandparents are finally in the grave and it’s a good thing.  It’s a really good thing.  And I am so thankful that I felt such love from them for my childhood and young adult life and that now we all know where they are for now and for the future.  Grandma Peggy and Grandpa Tex are at their place of rest, finally.