Final arrangements

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Partner and I are both getting on in age, and have begun to talk about our final arrangements.  Naturally we want to be together, even after we’re both defunct.  (This is irrational, but we’re human, so naturally we’re irrational.)

 

 

We have, unfortunately, discovered that we have a little discrepancy in our final wishes.

 

 

Partner wants to be cremated (after he’s dead, I mean, not today) and have his ashes thrown into the water off the Pacific island of Maui.

 

 

I want to be buried in a proper wooden casket and put in the ground in Venersborg, Washington, close to where I grew up, in a grave facing Spotted Deer Mountain, in northern Clark County.

 

 

So, you see, we have some negotiating to do.

 

 

I think we will do a catch-as-catch-can scenario.  If I go first (which I think is very possible), I want him to take me with him wherever he goes.  It would be nice if some little part of me – even a keepsake – were put in the ground near my parents, but really, it doesn’t matter that much.  It matters much more to me that I be with Partner.  He can take me to Maui if he likes.  There’s enough of me in Venersborg already, I suppose, after having grown up there. 

 

 

And, if he takes me with him to Maui, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And if (God forbid) Partner goes first, I will carry out his wishes, and he will swim with the fishes off Maui.  But a little pinch of him is going to stay with me, and I will be buried in Venersborg with an envelope in my pocket, and that envelope will have some of Partner in it.

 

 

And, if I bring a little piece of him to Venersborg with me, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

 

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Imaginary hometowns

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In Italo Calvino's novel “Invisible Cities,” Marco Polo describes imaginary places to the Emperor of China. They are wonderful, and impossible.

 

 

This is at least partly because they do not exist.

 

 

Okay, Italo Calvino. How about this?

 

 

The town my mother was born in no longer exists. The town my father was born in never existed. And the town I grew up in doesn't quite exist.

 

 

I will elaborate.

 

 

Bayne, Washington, where my mother was born, was a “railroad town,” with “houses” built for the railroad workers. When we took our yearly trip up to visit Grandma, Mom would point over into a field of yellowed grass and say: “I was born over there!” And all I could see were some burnt-out shacks lost in the trees and weeds. It still shows up on a few maps, but there's really nothing there.

 

 

Glade, Washington, where my father was born, was a fiction: just a name that my grandparents chose to call their farm in rural Klickitat County, Washington in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Dad was born in the Glade in January 1914. The weather was very cold. Grandma felt her water break (it was at least her third birth) and told Grandpa to hitch up the buckboard to take her into town to have her child. He took a long time about doing it, so Grandma (I'm quoting her, by the way) “mixed herself up a hot toddy to keep the cold away.”

 

 

By the time Grandpa got back in the house, Grandma was drunk on the kitchen floor, giving birth to Dad. She didn't quite know what to do with the umbilical cord; she knew it was supposed to be tied off, so she tried to loop Dad around and through it, as if tying a shoe.

 

 

They never quite made it into town. But Dad got born anyway, right there in the house, in “Glade, Washington,” which you will never find on any map. There's a Glade Cemetery, with a few markers. I dare you to find it.

 

 

As for me, I grew up in Venersborg, Washington. It's on the side of Spotted Deer Mountain, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It's not a real city or town; Wikipedia calls it a “census-designated place,” which sounds about right. Mom and Dad are buried in Venersborg Cemetery over by Finn Hill, and it's always the first place Partner and I go when we visit the Northwest. Sometimes, when I'm very nostalgic, we drive all the way up the hill to look (from a distance) at the house I grew up in. It's been remodeled, and it's different now.

 

 

But it's still there.

 

 

Children: be proud of your imaginary heritage!

 

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