Midnight Musings

Posted with Permission

I am walking with my nephew in the cemetery by my brother’s house. In a busy Southern New Hampshire city, this quiet cemetery is a safe place to walk. As my nephew rides his “big boy” bike, I watch the metal frame toddle and straighten, zig and zag along the grey crackled pavement. He rides ahead of me determined to master the balance of the two wheels and show me his breathtaking speed. He zooms around corners skidding to a halt beside me.

            “Hey, remember what happens when we skid?”

            “We get popped tires.”

            “And?”

            “Wipe out,” he says definitively, but I know only a part of him believes it. Like any good kid, he’s foolhardily brave and will learn the perils of popped tires and tight turns on his own as the years go by. After inheriting the family wild gene, he will no doubt ride home with scraped knees and cheeks, road rashes and bruises. With any luck, he will be spared the broken bones his father sported from those same life lessons and chutzpah.

            While I push his baby sister in a stroller, infinitely slower with the express purpose of getting her to nap mid-teething spell, he races off again, doing another loop around the cemetery. This time, as I watch him, I try to get a photo of what I am feeling, but I’m a lousy photographer. I miss the moment and catch him mid-teeter. I give up and instead hold the image in my mind’s eye. Carving it from memory, I let myself drift into daydreaming and writing.

There’s something about watching my nephew ride in the center of that paved road in the quiet of that cemetery that sparks a feeling deep inside of me. I think about the resting souls in their burial graves and the peaceful energy that permeates the memorial stones. This is a busy cemetery and many of the immaculately kept graves are covered in collected stones, artificial blooms, and patriotic flags. There are memorial cards from too recent funerals and the silent stoic presence of an excavator waiting for its next job. There’s peace here, too, a restfulness that’s more than the physical final bower of loved ones lost.

The souls are at peace here.

I can feel it.

And I wonder, as I watch my nephew riding his bike, discovering the limited and novel freedoms of being a growing kid, if those silent guardians laying in parallel lines along the grey speckled roadways of the cemetery like seeing him there. If his youthful energy and deep emotions remind them of what it was like to be alive, to be innocent, to feel joy. Here among the dead, he is guarded by stalwart guardians that stand in silent watch over his play. He shows them no disrespect, too caught up in his own world and, quite frankly, too good a kid to even think of it. I like to think it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

A cemetery, I think, is a strange and interesting place to play as a child. At the same time, aware of the shadows and dangers of the city outside his neighborhood, where the ravages of opioid epidemics and economic warfare leave their tracks on the wearied bodies of the living dead, I realize that here among these silent guardians, he can experience a quiet, unfettered joy he might not otherwise know.

At least here, I think, he is safe.