My cousin Glenda forwarded to me an email she had received containing getting old jokes. I could relate them all here, but I’m going to highlight the one that tickled me the most and seemed like something my dad would have said.

Just before the funeral services, the undertaker
came up to the very elderly widow and asked,
‘How  old was your husband?’
’96,’  she replied: ‘Two years younger than me’
‘So  you’re 98,’ the undertaker commented.
She responded, ‘Hardly worth going home, isn’t it?’

I forwarded the message to LZP and he sent back this reply:

Count Old Kook in

Well, all right, I decided to write something, but a I’m still at the stage where it could wind up being really literal , such as: SOMETHING.

So, I have been outside and fiddled with the weedeater and used the electric mower a wee bit in back; I am envisioning the backyard a solid mass of hostas – sort of like the tulip fields, only perennial and green and white striped.

Last evening we put out the trash, stomped and ready, but it was not picked up this morning. At first I thought about walking over to the brick wall of the house and banging my head against it, but then I remembered Monday was Memorial Day and trash days are delayed by a day. My forgetfulness could have initiated headbanging, but I thought maybe there might be a connection between the two. What I need are soft bricks.

Bit by bit, I am going through things and in my pile of hats, I found Der Bingle’s Reaper/Predator hat from the program he has been working on. And I put it on my head; I don’t think I’m going to give it back. (Pay no attention to UBO, who is making a sneak attack to grab the hat in the background.)

This tattered old thing belonged to my Grandma Jessie Shimp and then somewhere along the line Mother dug it out and started using it. It would be nice if I could say that I use it while whipping up great dishes like Grandma and Mother used to do, but I don’t like to cook. Usually it hangs on a nail in the kitchen reminding me of those two women.

I think I may have actually worn it once or twice, but there is no magic in it. I think even the Stouffer’s put in the oven lasagna sagged in the middle. Sigh. However, I need to make some poncho-like covers to throw on over my clothes when I am doing some things . . . such as gluing. We’ll just put that story in the never mind bin.

Some pictures make you smile a special way, accompanied by a tightening throat and tearing eyes. Here are two that do so:

This first one is my cousin Susie Woodrow Anderson, standing behind the bouquet she puts together for her Uncle Bob every year. She has an eye for bring colors together in a gentle balance. She’s been doing this for 16 years now. And I wanted to post this this year so I can always take a look at a family memory.

This second picture seems like it should have been presented first, but I don’t know, I guess I felt the finished product should be top of the post. This second one, though it obviously precedes the first one, reflects a deeper story. Notice how Susie is fussing over just how everything should be. If I’d been filming, you would hear her say how she wanted to get two of one of the blooms, but they only had one and she was disappointed and doing her best with the situation. This was no plopping of flowers in the vase. This took time. The lady on the right is Phyllis Sackmire Woodrow, my cousin Duane’s wife. They live about a mile down the road and often stop by to water the geraniums. One year, one very hot summer, they carried a milk jug of water and Phyllis fretted when they went on a trip . . . but when they returned it was flourishing and she wrote me a note about how happy she was. There is something extremely touching about this – Duane was Daddy’s first nephew, born back in the days before WW II. To be remembered is a wonderful thing.

The grave is right beside the roadway in a country cemetery in west/central Indiana. It is hours away from where I now live, but since the development of the Hoosier Heartland Highway, that time has been cut down and the vistas crossing the state are soothing, at least better that red lights and obscure turns.

I first made this trip to my father’s gravesite in 2000, the year he died and I think the monument had just been erected. We had a big pot of geraniums and ivy and a spike; it was quite attractive and it rode down seatbelted into the backseat of my mother’s car. She drove down. The way my parents had always gone – two lane roads, towns and cities to get through and moments of “Was that our turn?” No GPS and roads by the Wabash River that followed settlers. I drove back; I think I went a little out of my way and did Interstates.

That was a long time ago. This past Tuesday was not and this past Tuesday once again my cousins and I left flowers on our parents graves. We ate lunch together in Kingman, the town in which our parents grew up. Duane, Ann, Glenda, Susie and me . . . and Phyllis, Duane’s wife, whose folks are buried very close to Duane’s. She was at the basketball game when Duane broke his arm – one of my bedtime stories, dontcha know. It was an old-fashioned, down home eatery with a table of (cough, cough) older clientele. It was Tuesday, chicken and noodle day; I need to remember that Thursday is meatloaf day. Actually, I need to find an all you can eat meatloaf buffet place, but that’s just one of my quirks.

It was a cool day, but there was some sun; it wasn’t like the steamy day when we were rained on, sauna-ed and Daune heard something and said, “Isn’t that the tornado siren at Kingman?” I imagine the pot of geraniums got watered really well that day.

As the years pass, the visit to the cemetery seems like a revolving door of perception: yesterday, long ago, just yesterday, years ago . . .

When we were eating I sat across from my cousin Ann, and I recalled how when I was little and afraid, I would run to my dad, yelling, “Take. Take. Take.” I said sometimes things in life happen and I feel that impulse and have to fight to keep my arms from reaching up. Yesterday, long ago – all the same in your heart.

The buildings are long and built of red brick, with rows of windows lined up like soldiers. I’m talking about the earlier days of Veteran’s Administration hospitals. I’ve just spent 20 minutes looking for a picture postcard of one that I picked up at an antique store; I thought I’d posted it here because on the back was a note from a father to young daughter, telling her this was where he was. It touched me. Obviously, I tucked it away somewhere; so it is where a lot of personal history winds up, stuck between pages, in the back of drawers, folded inside old envelopes.

When you drive by these old buildings, and people seldom do anymore – or if the do, they are unaware of it – you general see an expanse of lawn and a big brick building from another era. But that is just a part of it. The old VA hospitals of the early 20th century were campuses of such buildings, complete with their own chapels and power plants and barracks type residence halls for employees and fancy homes for the commander and a couple of colonels. And like at almost every other government base, there were duplex houses for the lesser officers and doctors. I’ve lived in that type of housing, newer – built in the 50’s and 70’s, but still a duplex. One building with two mirrored floorplans.

These campuses have winding roads, almost lanes that cross the area the way park roads run. In most areas, they have been repaved, but there are places where the bricks remain. You have to look into your imagination for the other reminders of what was once here. On the grassy areas, you can see the ghosts of men in old-fashioned wheelchairs, nurses in longish white uniforms with caps, fellows on crutches out for a bit of fresh air, blinded men sitting with their faces to the sun.

Oh, and often, there is a large quiet stretch of crosses, row on row, just as the poem says.

I went on a short tour of one of these old places in Danville, Illinois. It is now a community college, where people can get a head start on an education or catch-up on one that they missed for various reasons. They, probably, for the most part, are not what you think of when it comes to college students – especially if you are older. My father once looked at the the people walking along the paths at IU and said, “Why, they are just babies.” Most of us back then were. Fresh-faced and younger than we knew. Sporting high school diplomas and enrolling in traditional classes of Western Civ and English Composition, having no real idea of a major.

A lot of the students at this VA complex – turned community college are there to improve their chance at getting a productive job and establishing a stable lifestyle.

My cousin is a teacher there, has been for a long time. She won awards and has a dedicated legion of former students. I kind of see her like the buildings themselves, brick upon brick to make something big.