what's to come

An exceedingly wise and insightful man, Marcus Aurelius deprecated fame, reputation, wealth, power, honors as fleeting, nothing and totally meaningless once one is dead and gone, oblivious. This came to mind earlier as I was sipping a cup of black and contemplating what my loved ones may find out about me as they go through my things.

In 1966 we moved PCS from Yokosuka, Japan home to the US for my first duty station in WashingtonDC. Searching in Northern Virginia for a place to live, we rented a delightful house off Route 236, just a mile outside the Beltway on Wakeful Chapel Road. Our next-door neighbors were a wonderful, loving family, not always sensible in my view the times I watched the father and his two boys out in the front yard having crabapple fights and thinking with Ralphie's mother "you'll shoot your eye out". But kind folks. I'm thinking of the summer 1967 when Linda went with Malinda and Jody to visit her parents in Scottsdale, Arizona and I let my dirty dishes pile up into a horrible, disgusting mess in the kitchen sink, and did not mow the front yard for weeks while the grass grew a foot tall and higher. 

One day I came home from work at the Navy Annex to not only the lawn mowed but also the kitchen immaculate. While I was at work, the wife next door had come in and cleaned up my kitchen, and the husband had mowed the lawn. Jehovah's Witnesses, they were a family of the nicest folks I ever knew. But I was humiliated that my filthy habits had been noticed and revealed to the world. Of course, I did it to myself, the humiliation.  

There are secrets in every life, some of which we carry to the grave, "closed in the sod" as William Alexander Percy has it in his poem hymn "They cast their nets in Galilee". One might hope that those who live on after us will toss everything en masse and let the dead bury their dead, but most of us probably sort through the memories of those who've just died, tossing this and keeping that. About those memories: I'm trying to cover my tracks, but who knows.

After her death, one thing we found about Linda's mother was a box of dozens, or maybe hundreds, of toothpaste tube caps. It does make a little sense, at least to me, in that I remember it being no worries when the toothpaste tube cap was lost, because there was always a spare cap or two in the side drawer in the bathroom. But hundreds? It hints more than simple eccentricity. 

For sure, one thing they'll find out about me is in my vast collection of motel soaps and little tubes of shampoo from motels over the years. What else? Oh, there's plenty, many other things, I just need to go through and clean out the evidence. But then, as Marcus said, what difference does it make? What they find after I'm gone will neither help nor harm me.

On the other hand, there's the Jewish sense that after death one lives on through the memories of friends and loved ones. So even though "one's ownself" is (Revelation 21:4) obliviously where there is neither sorrow, nor crying neither shall there be any more pain, nevertheless out of sheer lovingkindness while one is still here, one might be mindful that those whom one leaves behind could be hurt by what one held onto, or carelessly left to be found. 

Thus at the moment, I'm thinking not only of the toothpaste tube caps and my dirty dishes, but also of the picture we found in Mama's things, a photograph of her and her high school sweetheart standing together, on the back marked "Tom 17 and Louise 16". My father was never called Tom, that Tom was not my father, he was the boy Mama was talking about that evening in September 1941 (I've told this many times) when she got me aside in the dining room and said "You're starting school tomorrow. What do you want them to call you?" And I said, "Not Bubba. How about Tom?" And she said, "No, it can't be Tom, because in high school I had a boy friend named Tom, and your daddy still hates him". So I, shy and self-conscious enough as it was, was stuck with "Carroll" all the next twelve years of my growing up. I didn't know that boy named Tom or what he looked like until I was 75 years old. And then, going through old newspaper clippings in Mama's things, I saw that one year he Tom and my father Carroll had played on the Pensacola High School Tigers football team together; and in the following year's clipping, Tom was still playing for Pensacola, while my father Carroll was playing for the Bay High Tornadoes. 

We may be what we are in this life, but in the life to come, we become, for those who are still here, what we inadvertently left behind. 

Two pictures from this morning's sunrise.

T