Both Arthur Miller and Hunter Thompson have died recently – one essentially of old age and the other, because of it (age that is), by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Their deaths, apparently, impacted me but lightly.
Today I arose early – it’s a Sunday, my wife slept into the mid-morning and my daughter and her friend, who was spending the night, didn’t go to bed until the wee hours so they were comatose. I tiptoed around anyway, quietly making coffee, checking the e-mail and showering. Eventually I took possession of the car keys, kissed my wife on the cheek and left for an early morning drive.
I took a thermal mug full of Starbucks with me and stopped at a grocery with a bakery to buy a couple of butter croissants (is there any other type?).
It’s funny how most of those who are about on a Sunday morning – churchgoers, bicyclers, hikers, bird-watchers – are generally a wholesome group. They were everywhere I drove. I pointed the car aimlessly and ended up near Gates Pass on the far western side of Tucson, passing birders, cyclists and hikers. Over the years the city has grown up along the Catalina foothills and east up to the swell of the Saguaro National Monument along the edge of the Rincons. Now houses are popping up along the low hills that presage the Santa Margaritas and they’ve also invaded the black, rocky heights of the Tucson Mountains to the west of the city.
The Tucson Mountains are anything but lofty. They are squat but their summits are ragged and look unscale-able. As you climb them, even in a car, you notice the ground is bare and rocky. The prevailing color is a burnt brown, a desert singed by the heat of summers that out there, on the western littoral of settlement, are fiercer than on the more settled eastern side of the city.
I listened to a piece on NPR about the way that the British had taken Hunter Thompson’s death to heart. I never read anything he wrote – still unlikely, the notion of reading the political commentary of a drug-addled egomaniac doesn’t appeal. Instead I pointed the car toward East Lawn, a cemetery on the east side.
I hadn’t been within the boundaries of East Lawn for more than a decade. It was cool, bird song was prominent. The trees that were scattered around seemed to have grown thicker and more rooted than the last time. I parked the car on one of the roadways. There was almost no one around. I wandered across the grass; it was a pleasant morning.
The grave markers at East Lawn are flat on the earth. Each one faces up to the sky. The mowers simply pass over them.
I randomly read out the distillations of lives that the stones offered. Many were poignant, especially when the interred was a child; some of those for the dead, full of years, were simple, unaffected and noble.
For more than half an hour I wandered around. What I was looking for was near one of those now matured trees but there were more of them than I remembered and the cemetery itself was far bigger than I recalled.
I finally found it, my father’s grave. He rests near a tree, still proximate an edge of the cemetery. From the angle of repose, you can still see out towards the mountains, where the Catalinas and the Rincons nearly intersect. More, though, there is some comfort that Dad still rests near the boundary of the occupied parts of the cemetery. He would have wanted it that way; he belonged to that desert, even when it’s condensed down to a scrubby plot adjacent to the manicured rows of flat stones celebrating unremarked lives like his.
The profound sadness I felt was not so much at his passing; I miss him still, probably more now than ever but the bittersweet memories, as a friend whose child was murdered once told me, grows more sweet than bitter with the passing of years. What I felt sad about was that the sheer humanity of my Dad’s story, at least that part that I’d been part of, remains untold.
I cannot let this pass; I must tell Dad’s story, at least that part which I shared.
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