Pleased to become a part of my Cabinet, Samuel Pickering shared with me an essay he had just finished writing about Karrakatta Cemetery, which he often visited while living in Perth, Western Australia:
In part I write about death because I have reached the noose end of my days. More importantly, though, optimism thrives amid the humus of tombs. Sam Pickering also describes the Perth War Cemetery:
The grass was green and plush. The stones ran in straight lines, and not a tendril had worked loose from plantings embroidering walkways. The order, of course, masked the turmoil war imposed on families. Back at Karrakatta (where Heath Ledger's family has a plot, I learned when I Googled the above image) Sam has taken a break:
After leaving the cafe, I decided to read more tombstones, for epitaphs are often the beginnings, not the endings, of stories, for example, "Our Pop" and "We have lost what heaven has gained / The best little girl the earth contained." In the essay, he wanders the "renewed" and the sandy, blighted old sections of the cemetery, picks up and puts back down a half-buried small oval grave number he considers taking home:
"That's the end of it," I thought. But that wasn't the end. Certainly endings in cemeteries are more complex, turning back on themselves and becoming beginnings and middles. I agree with Sam that the older sections of cemeteries are the more appealing. When I went to a meeting of the
Association for Gravestone Studies back in 1987, the group toured a local burial site that was being reclaimed from a stand of woods. I had to hurry to get some beautiful photographs of the slate stones before restoration-minded members plucked the ivy off.
I have done 2 posts about author and professor Sam Pickering. In the 1st, I remarked that he was my favorite professor at the University of Connecticut, and in the 2nd I included an excerpt from an unpublished essay he wrote about his visit to Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth, Western Australia. In this 3rd post, I bring to your attention his 21st book, A Comfortable Boy: A Memoir. Of the book he writes, “My readers are likely to be old and content, their muscles corpses of themselves, their thinking realistic, beyond believing in reformation by sentence. Still, for readers intent on nosing up lessons, the book is filled with little, forgettable accounts of decency and love, stories that nudge the funny bone and provoke soft smiles. Perhaps a few readers will close this book and scrolling back through their years discover the stuff of their happiness, material that will make them appreciate the present more.” It’s a gentle book full of strong characters that does make you conjure up remembrances of your own. It provoked in me the memory – undocumented in any photo album – of my Dad icing up the horn of the life-sized rhinoceros he, my sister, and I built in the front yard of my childhood home after a heavy snow. As an only child growing up in the South, Sam liked nothing better than to rummage in his relatives’ attics, and in this memoir relays the fruits of some of those labors: the quirky content of birthday cards and saved newspaper clippings, in addition to letters shared between family members who fought on both sides of the Civil War. My favorite story in the book follows the description of young Sammy’s voracious reading habits. “After reading Treasure Island,” he writes, “I roamed landlocked woods hoping to find gold, not pieces of eight in a dead man’s chest, but an abandoned car, money hidden in a suitcase under the front seat, or if not money, a body, preferably a skeleton, locked in the trunk. Forty years later when I found a Volvo in woods near our house in Nova Scotia, moss flaring up over the sides and planters of ferns on the roof and atop the trunk, I scattered forty ‘loonies,’ brassy dollar coins, throughout the car. The next day I led the children on a salamander expedition during which we just happened to discover the car and its golden treasure. A man does not become the books he read, but books can certainly contribute to the fun of being a parent.” With only a few such insights into the man, the bulk of the book is about the physical and metaphorical wanderings of the boy. And his comfort rubs off on the reader.
