To be fair, POB (partner of blogger) has more traditional notions of Father’s Day. She invited everyone over for brunch and made a blueberry pie from SCRATCH (I know, I know, I am grateful every day that she doesn’t realize she can do better than me).
SOB (sister of blogger) and I took DOB (father of blogger) and HOSOB (husband of SOB) to the cemetery. SOB and DOB really, really, wanted to go to the cemetery. It scared me a little, because I feared something foreboding about needing to visit the dead.
At DOB’s age, it is like taking him to visit his friends. For HOSOB, it was his first time meeting Mom. It was about time that HOSOB was formally introduced.
I rented a car. A Mercedes. I decided that it was important for our dead relatives to know that we are prosperous a few generations on in this country and that the “Vohrr” (as in World War II) was over as it concerns German products.
We schlepped to where most New York Jews are buried — Long Island. As we passed the Jewish cemeteries we made sure to say them in an old Yiddish accent, with the requisite throat clearing, “Achhhhem, Beth Moses Cemeterrrrry, dahlink”. “Turn onto Vellvood [Wellwood] Avenue.”
First, we visited Mom. Mom always packed a sweater in August and the day of her funeral was so bone-chillingly cold. SOB and I still feel guilty that we left her in the cemetery on that January day. And to add insult to injury, we left her all alone to fend for herself among Dad’s deceased family, also resident in the family plot. My grandmother never had a nice word to say about Mom. And vice-versa. Uncle Loud was, let’s just say, narrow-minded. His wife was lovely, but she screeched when she talked. My other uncle was a difficult guy. We positioned Mom’s grave so that she would be closest to those she tolerated, loved even, in life.
There were stones on the graves (a Jewish custom to show the grave has been visited) except for the one difficult uncle. Really, really, really? My cousins visited the cemetery and put stones on Uncle and Aunt Louds’ headstones, our grandparents’ headstones and our mother’s headstone, but they couldn’t put a stone on our other uncle’s headstone? The headstone is not even inches away from my grandmother’s. In death as in life, the competitions and the divisions remain.
Then we visited Mom’s parents in the next cemetery over. They have graves in the International Workers Organization plot. All headstones are the same height in this plot, in keeping with its socialist and egalitarian ethos. I remember that my grandfather’s headstone was laid, but we didn’t have an unveiling because Mom’s cancer came back shortly before her father died and she just couldn’t have a ceremony, for a gazillion emotional reasons. So, more than ten years have passed and as I looked at the stone, I thought the stone cutters got part of my grandfather’s Hebrew name wrong. Oy. This is a huge problem in Jewish tradition. So I better do some research first before I call a foul.
We started the drive back to the City and blueberry pie. My father tried to navigate us to Queensboro bridge (why pay a toll?) and started each wrong instruction with an “Achhhhem” eerily reminiscent of the old generation. We got a little lost in Queens, which is like being in another country to the spoiled Manhattanites that are SOB and I. I saw the Empire State Building and just started driving toward it. Luckily, we didn’t have to swim. We found the bridge.
We arrived in time for blueberry pie and all was well with the world.
