Attempt at a Mother’s Day script, and Other Rambles

Here’s a transcript with extras from a “Sound Of My Own Voice” take I did at the chapel on Mother’s Day.

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Hello.

I should have known there would be more people than usual at the cemetery today.

It is Mother’s Day.

Lots of folks are out here leaving mementos on their mother’s or grandmother’s burial sites. One family let their angry Pit Bull run around the place. I stayed away from them.

I guess it is natural enough on this day that I would have thoughts about my own mother.

She is buried next to our father.

She had said, for years, that she wanted to be cremated, and her ashes cast into some kind of oblivion. She did not think anyone would ever come visit her burial site.

She changed her mind when I told her I would visit.

So far she was right. It is a long way from here — it’s a long way from anywhere — but still, I have not been out to visit her site as promised. As far as I know, neither has anybody else.

I started thinking about my “Final Arrangements”. This line of thinking did not arise from any sense of urgency or fears about mortality. But when you spend any amount of time wandering around these cemeteries it becomes a natural enough matter for any reasonably responsible adult to think about taking care of.

If I had given these matters much thought in the past I would have assumed that one way or another I would end up here, at Calvary, a place I love. I have walked countless miles and discovered endless stories out here.

The cemetery is finally building columbaria and allowing for what is still among the Catholics considered the non-traditional act of cremation. But they are just not doing things the way I have in mind for myself. I intend to be cremated. Calvary has only relatively recently entered into the business of building columbaria and selling niches for the storage of cremated remains. Generations of stigmas continue to keep Catholics from embracing the practice of cremation. But as Calvary entered into this realm I find they are not doing it in the way I would like. The Garden of the Holy Family Columbarium, which is at 2nd Calvary, is the cemetery’s first such structure. It is not designed such as I have in mind for myself. I want objects from my life placed in an indoor glass cabinet, such as found at St. Michael’s and other grounds in New York.

First and foremost I want a Wild Thing stuffed animal placed at the right of the cabinet. The Wild Thing something my mother gave me. I was well into adulthood when she decided I should have this. It followed a pattern of gift-giving in which she claimed to be making amends for the toys I should have had as a child. I never had a train set, because I said I did not want one. She thought that shocking. To make up for this youthful void she sent me a model train set for Christmas when I was in my 30s. She additionally lamented my lack of exposure to the Mother Goose series of nursery rhymes. And to her dying day she could not believe that I do not like mashed potatoes.

Another item I’d like in my cabinet is a music box. Here, again, is a motherly connection. In the early 1990s, at which time it cost what was a lot of money to me, I got my mother for Christmas a music box which played “Send in the Clowns” and featured a gyrating puppet of a clown. As with all music boxes the clown, along with the music, gradually slowed to a finis.

She loved the music box until, without thinking anything of it, I mentioned the place where I had purchased it: The Trump Tower. With that she threatened to throw the thing into the garbage. As far back as the early 1990s she had formed a strong opinion about the man who would, she would have been revolted to see, become President of the United States.

Before this revelation my mother and I talked about that music box. She loved it for its sadness. She might say that about any music box. To her the music box was a genre, one which appealed to her insatiably maudlin appetite for finding sadness in all things. A music box, she might say, could only die. Wind and rewind this clown until your hands hurt from doing it. All music boxes die eventually, their rebirth an almost moribund entertainment.

And for this I debate if I want my columbarium space to contain a music box that visitors are allowed to wind up, and listen to it as it dies. That would require drilling a hole through the cabinet glass and making the windup thing accessible to visitors. It can be done, by hook or by crook.

But should it be that music box? She never discarded it, as threatened. And as for me I consider the Trump Tower connection to be spurious. Or rather, the connection to our current president is spurious. I happened to purchase it at a store in the Trump Tower but back then the selection of items at those stores had little if anything to do with the owner of the building. This differs markedly from today.

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OK, this got too long and wordy for a recorded take. Going back home to work on that. The whole Trump thing does even belong here. In the end she still had the music box and probably forgot about its connection to the TT.

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Managed to sleep sans booze last night, with only the crutch of half a panic pill. Was that 2 nights in a row? No, I guess it was not. Lotsa luck there. Now I am jacked on caffeine and looking at the pretty girls at the Starbucks. Listening to Lara Auerbach on the Spotify, thinking I could write stuff like this. It’s her 24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41. Preludes, it seems, are always easy. Well, easy for me to say, but when I wrote more it seemed a Prelude could be just about anything. ABA, ABB, AAA. And loosely grouping the set together around repeated motifs, well, that’s easy, too.

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At a pub the other night I was leaving and I noticed there were four guys sitting at the bar. None seemed to know each other. They were all sitting 3 or 4 seats apart. Every one of them was swiping left, swiping right, on the likes of Tinder and its ilk. If that says something about the present social reality in which we live then I am not certain how to articulate just what that something is. Certainly there is a cultural study to made into The Anatomy of a Swipe, and that is if Tinder itself is not already mining its swipe data to build profiles of the world’s most and least beautiful man and woman.

I actually matched up with someone on Bumble last week. A beautiful Asian woman with amazing air. Her opening salvo to me was: “What do you think of contemporary music?” I responded as well as I could but all I could think was that she appears to be a very smart person and that this is exactly the kind of stupid question smart people ask. It’s like asking a mechanic “What do you think of cars?”

I told her of Lubomyr Melnyk and Lara Auerbach, of my disdain for the Bang on a Can set, and of the few soft spots I still maintain for select few (very few) Philip Glass scores.

Happy to say she didn’t respond.