Well Meg...

...you might ask......."Just how long was Rick supposed to stay with you?" Well, let me put it this way...if you asked me where I saw myself in about a hundred years, my answer would have been something like this:

Yes, I actually foresaw a time when Rick and I would spend eternity near each other rotting in our graves. Isn't that romantic? You don't often find someone with whom you are prepared to rot.

Alas.

Well, I guess I'll have to rot alone. Do you ever wonder about graves and what's in them? I do. I've been to some pretty cool cemeteries. I went to Arlington of course and Gettysburg and they have one here in Marietta that was started in the Civil War. Last week I found one in Roswell that had people from the early 1800's. It was pretty cool.

Once when I was a kid...14 I think...I was playing in an old cemetery down the street from my house. I lived on Church Road, named after the ten churches on the two mile road. Some of them were old German churches that had old cemeteries full of the early settlers of the town, Bensenville.

Scary places for sure, and we had to go to them on Halloween. 14 year old girls like to scare each other. I had one friend that loved to be scared so I scared her well...and I was pretty creative. We all were. But Lori was more into it than most of us. I just thought we were playing...but it turned out that she had some serious psychiatric issues and the scaring each other stuff was a big part of her illness. Who knew? I just thought she was a normal 14 year old. But, I guess normal is relative.

So, she was in the cemetery that night when I laid down in a grave with a huge oak leaf in my hands, clasped over my chest. One of my friends screamed and pointed at the headstone above me and then they all did the same. I jumped up and saw the name "Margaret" on the headstone. Nothing else at all on that tombstone, just the name, "Margaret". Of course, we ran home screaming. We did a lot of that.

Anyway, the last time I saw Lori was at her house one night that I spent over there. We were sunburned because we stood in front of these huge sunlights that her mother had. We didn't understand why it wasn't working. Later on that night we were burned to a crisp. We ended up playing this card game that we loved called Spit for hours listening to the red and blue Beatles album. Then, whenh we went to bed, we freaked each other out. I knew that we were going to because we always did. So, during the course of the evening, I set up a few really cool freak out things. I attached a thread to the curtains and another one to the light switch. That's all that I remember but there was more.

The next thing I heard she was in a nuthouse. Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?

So...don't you think we should come uo with a better idea than cemeteries? I think at the very least we should just have big gardens of flowers that grow well with people dirt. Then, you could just keep adding a bunch more people as the years went by. If your husband was a drunk, you could pick a flower that grows well in the presence of alcohol.

I don't like the thought that cemeteries are only kept nice for a relatively short time before they fall into disrepair. I saw a few headstones in a corner formed by fences at an entrance ramp to a highway. These people were rarely even noticed by the thousands of commuters that drove past them in the course of a day. The rest of the cemetery had obviously been purchased and moved...I imagined one family that wouldn't give in and left their parents in traffic.

Anyway, I would rather be a garden, wouldn't you? Things change pretty fast, especially if you hang around long enough and see enough places. The house that my great-grandfather grew up in back in the days of blacksmiths and horses, was now on a large corner at a very busy intersection in Roanoke, Virginia. The house had enough land in front of it to end up at that large intersection. My great grandfather, Papaw, as we called him, had been a blacksmith at one time. Imagine his surprise when they invented cars. He didn't form a union and bitch, he became a carpenter instead.

I was lucky enough to know a few of my great grandparents and they never got divorces. But, my great grandmother, widowed by her first husband, had always been married to Grandpa Frank as far as I knew.

But when Granny died and her funeral card (whatever they call those things) had a different name than Frank's and I had always known her to use his name. I pointed it out to my mother who told me that, for tax purposes or social security, I forget, they couldn't afford to get married. They were just a couple of old people who lived together, back in the 60's when most old people were whining about the numbers of young people who lived together in sin. I asked my mom, "So, they were living in sin?" And she responded, "Well...I don't know how much "sin" they were capable of...don't you dare tell anyone." Duh. I figured something out and I was 14 or 15. My mother was annoyed that I knew.

Mom had to answer in a way that neither made her grandmother look bad nor did it make living together look good. I guess she did all right. I was pretty much afraid of her until I realized that I had 6 inches on her and could have snapped her like a twig. I think she and I both realized it at the same time. She was yelling at me and came so close to me that the height difference was exaggerated. I backed up onto one step of the flight of stairs that led to my bedroom and the difference was exaggerated even more. We were staring into each others eyes and I was pretty sure that we were on the same page. But...I knew better than to push it and to be honest, when she lost it, she was pretty frightening. She chased me through a bowling alley one night and I made the mistake of running into the Girl's Room. She cornered me there and somehow refrained from doing a Rodney King on me...just long enough to get me home anyway.

When she got me home that night, in the privacy of the living room, my mother almost murdered me. Then, she sent me upstairs to my father and he got a go at me too. I remember thinking that it was dreadfully unfair to be spanked twice for the same offense. How much worse could it get? I might as well have robbed a bank, kids didn't get arrested back then. The cops just took you home where your parents beat the crap out of you. No muss, no fuss.

Well, I'm gonna go act like it's daylight, see ya.

Meg