Wednesday: St. John's Cemetery and the Fish House

Good adventure yesterday, Wednesday, for Linda, Joe, Kristen and me. We drove to Pensacola (Joe drove, I rode all the way in the back, in the third seat of Linda’s red station wagon, a very comfortable stretch-out seat. It's a Buick Enclave, and I can recommend where to buy one). In Pensacola we toured St. John’s Historic Cemetery, where my Gentry grandparents and Weller grandparents are buried. Blowing through in 2004, Hurricane Ivan left a beautiful old cemetery desolate, looking like a stretch of what you see of west Texas from your window seat on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited, which runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles. 

The cemetery dates to 1876. You get there through the entry gatehouse on W. Belmont Street. Since Ivan, it’s not as charming as I remember it from the late 1940s, but it’s a final resting place for family, and my own burial directions (wishing me long years) call for some of my ashes to be scattered in both plots if (God forbid) I should die (wishing me a hundred twenty years).

Buried in the Weller plot are, in order of death, my father’s sister Carrie Lee, who died just after her first birthday in 1898; my uncle Alfred who drowned January 7, 1918 when the fishing schooner Annie & Jennie wrecked in a storm just outside the Old Pass. Mom, my grandmother Carrie Lee Weller (1877-1947); and Pop, my grandfather Alfred Daniel Weller (1872-1964). And their three daughters Ruth, Marguerite, and Evalyn.

In one car, my father, mother and I followed the white 1941 Buick hearse from Wilson Funeral Home in Panama City to the cemetery in Pensacola; and I remember where I sat and wept as Mom’s casket was lowered into the ground that day in January 1947, my earliest experience of grief, and afterward went to my other grandparents' home for dinner. Pop died while we lived in Japan. I officiated the funerals of Ruth and Evalyn. My father’s ashes are in the columbarium at Holy Nativity: I officiated his funeral too, because Father Bob and Charlotte Battin were in England. That day, grandson Nick carried the small wooden cross for me as crucifer.

There are three graves in the Gentry plot. Margaret (1913-1939), the wife of my mother’s brother Wilbur, died of spinal meningitis. She died July 24, 1939, the day my brother Walt was born. That week I was staying with my Gentry grandparents in Pensacola while my mother was in Panama City hospital for Walt’s birth. Margaret’s casket was in the living room of my grandparents’ home at 1317  E. Strong Street. Late the night before her funeral there at the house, our aunt Mildred, my mother’s youngest sister, took me and Wilbur’s two children Margaret (4 1/2) and Bill (2 1/2) into the living room and showed us their mother in the open casket. I was three, almost four years old. My mother was quite upset later when she found out Mildred had done this, but it's a good memory for me.

The other two graves are my mother’s father, Walter Henry Gentry (1885-1976), Daddy Walt. And her mother Mamie McClammy Gentry (1890-1988). We called her Mamoo. She had six grandsons, and we were all pallbearers at her funeral. We all felt like we were her favorite; but I KNEW I was, being first and oldest grandson, and getting the choicest foods cooked and waiting for me when I arrived for a visit.

We drove from the cemetery to the Fish House restaurant overlooking Pensacola Bay. Had a seafood feast there and drove home.

Wednesday was good, not a sad day at all, but a day of fond remembering. Today is Thursday: Thor, Norse god of thunder. 

Peace and Quiet anyway.

Tom