Tombstones

Carl McIntyre’s home on Patterson Avenue is about a three-block walk from his place of employment: Sunnyside Cemetery, where some of the town’s most prominent people have been laid to rest after doing whatever they did – good or bad – to make them prominent in the first place.

It made no difference to Carl, who was the cemetery’s maintenance supervisor, because by the time he had to deal with them they’d all reached that unavoidable point in life where their doing good or bad was over.

Every day at noon Carl would walk up to the highest point in the cemetery, sit down and eat the sack lunch he had prepared for himself that morning. Carl wasn’t married. He used to be married, but 30 years earlier he came home to find his wife had run off with the milkman. So for anyone making a joke about some guy’s wife messing around with the milkman, understand it does happen once in a while although there probably are no statistics on exactly how often.

Carl would eat his two sandwiches, apple and two chocolate chip cookies, washing them down with a 12-ounce can of Pepsi (always regular, none of that diet stuff for Carl). He had sworn off milk years ago for obvious reasons, willing to trade off the loss of calcium in the process. Still, his bones were pretty good for a guy in his 50s.

When he was done eating he would spend the rest of his lunch break reading the morning paper, or just sitting there looking down at all the tombstones.  The guys working under him would look up the hill and wonder why Carl would just sit up there when he could be doing other things, like texting or reading Playboy magazines, during lunch.

For the record, Carl has never texted, and probably never will. If Carl ever was interviewed on 60 Minutes or some show like that and was asked what’s the one text you would send if you could only send one text in your life he would probably answer either “I don’t text,” or “Death to all milkmen.”

Finally, one of the younger men on the crew – Josh Wilson – walked up the hill one day and asked Carl, “How come you always sit up here during lunch and look down at the tombstones?”

Carl motioned for Josh to sit down before answering.

“Did you ever think that every tombstone represents someone, and every one of them had a story?”

Josh shook his head no.

“There’s a woman who was going to get married until her fiancé was killed in the war, leaving her to wonder what if for the rest of her life. The man who fought off cancer long enough to dance at his daughter’s wedding when he had no other reason to keep living. The guy who figured when he died no one would miss him – and he was right. Not one person has come to his grave in the five years he’s been here.”

“They’re all down there?” Josh asked.

“Yep. Each stone is a different life. Most of them just got lost in the shuffle. Some name on a list or a number in a book. Each life going down a different road. Every story different and yet they all end up in the same place: right here.”

“What about the ones who are lost at sea or something like that?” Josh asked. “They don’t end up here.”

Carl looked at Josh. “How can someone so dumb have the capacity to overthink things like you do?”

Carl got up and walked down the hill to go back to work. Every once in a while thinking about the tombstones would make him reevaluate his life. That’s not a particularly bad thing. It appeared this would be one of those days.

But one thing wasn’t changing: no milk.

That one was non-negotiable.