Week 31 - Do the Cemetery Roses Thing

Before writing this I came about the unusual discovery that I may produce more earwax than the average human being.  The question now is what do I do with this knowledge?

As you may have guessed I'm having a frightfully productive day.  But enough of that, we stand at the precipice of week 31.  Technically not "at" the precipice more like "over" the precipice,  I'm not sure "over" makes sense.

Enough rambling.  This week offering her hand to the hat, we have Jane.

In the future this is how people will propose

The result is an interesting one with a bit of a backstory.  This entry is likely to be a little more maudlin and high school philosophy than most so no hard feelings, dear reader, if you decide to take a pass.

"Do the Cemetery Roses Thing"

A while back, I had the thought that it would be nice to find a paupers graveyard, and to place some flowers on all the graves of the forgotten and unloved.  After some research I found that there really aren't any modern paupers graveyards or at least not any near me.  Still, once planted, I've carried this seed with me for the better part of a decade.  So, now I will be able to do it, or some variant of it.

The goal is to find graves of people who are forgotten or unloved.  People who died with the world hardly taking any notice.  The Eleanor Rigby's of the world.  Or father Mackenzie if you prefer.

So what's the point?
This is a fair question and one I've thought about a lot.  The act would be entirely symbolic in nature and whatever money/time I spent doing it would be much better put to use on the living.

The question at the root of it all is "is there value in a symbolic act?".  More so is there value if no one sees it?  I don't have answers for these questions.  I don't have any expectation that doing this will have any impact on the world, or even my own life.  Still, to me, and only for me, I feel that doing this will create a simple moment of beauty in my life.   That's the hope at least. 

And isn't that what were all doing here anyway?

But please, remember me fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then they went on to say
That the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Like "We'll meet again" and "Fuck the man"
And "Tell my mother not to worry"  
Iron and Wine - The Trapeze Swinger

So how was it?

It was a beautiful Sunday, and with the added religious significance of the day I thought it would be a perfect time.  So I set out to a few grocery stores and filled up my cart on all the discount flowers I could find, trying to maximize the cost per flower.

This times 3

  All in all I ended up with approximately 150 flowers across assorted bouquets.  My goal was the local cemetery from my home town, which I remembered as being very old and very small.  Turns out it was not nearly as small as I remembered, but more on that later.

An interesting aside, when you show up at a grocery store counter (desk?) with 10 bundles of flowers you'd expect some sort of reaction, but this was not the case.  I'm not sure what that means, just an interesting thing to come out of this.

I pulled up to the cemetery around 4 PM, it was completely empty and terribly calm and sunny out.  Funny how just being at a cemetery I expected the weather to change to suit the location, it should have been overcast and somber but it wasn't.

Immediately I realized that I had drastically underestimated the number of flowers needed, I'd guess the number of graves there is probably closer to 500.  But, I still had enough flowers to make an impact so I set off.

No snarky comments here.  It took about an hour.  It wasn't magical, I didn't learn some valuable lesson about myself.  But spend sometime walking around looking at graves of families, of infants and teenage sons, and fathers and mothers and it will impact you no matter how jaded you are.

For everyone out there who's lost someone, or who's afraid of losing someone this is for you.  We'll be back next week with a return to the normal half-assed wackiness.