The young man had a layover in Chicago and there was a bad storm and his flight was rescheduled for the next afternoon. The airline was very kind about the whole ordeal and they apologized profusely. Yes, they knew who the young man was. Yes, they would see about getting him a seat on another airline. Yes, they would try everything they could. They booked him a room at the Hilton across the street. A nice suite; not a room for just anybody.

“What am I supposed to do with the rest of my day? It’s two in the afternoon?”  

The young man had never been to Chicago before. This surprised him because he had family that lived there. And his father had grown up there. He thought about all the cousins he never got to know and he wondered what they were like. What did they do with their lives? Did he have anything in common with them? Were they happy? Did they believe in God? He thought about all this and more as he towed his luggage across the street and entered the Hilton.

“Hello sir, welcome to the O’Hare Hilton. How long will you be staying with us?”

“Hopefully less than twenty-four hours.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

He paced around his room, restlessly. It was too early to hit the bottle, there was nothing good on TV and he didn’t feel much like a nap. The city was forty minutes away with traffic and so more accurately, the young man was stranded not in Chicago, but in some suburb; some non-place with lots of glowing neon signs and brown sludge snow and ugly billboards and people buying one more, just one more lottery ticket and heaving smoke clouds into their mittened fists; bundled up in layers; not sure why they’ve stayed so many winters, not sure why they don’t just leave right this minute. But they never do. They never leave.

“This place is the dumps, mom.”

He called his mother. He told her of his unbearable plight. She couldn’t believe it. Oh, Jesus Christ. Did he hear about Mary? She ate the whole thing. Did he hear about Steven on the east coast? He got some prestigious award from Brown. Camilla was getting fat, wasn’t she?

He asked his mother where his grandpa was buried.

“I have the entire day. I thought maybe I’d swing by his grave.”

 His mother thought that was a very dumb idea. In the cold! God no. Even so, she had no idea how to locate the grave.

“Well, can you at least ask dad?”

“He’s on the stair machine, honey. I’ll text you when he’s off of it.”

“Great.”

Forty-six minutes later, he received his mother’s text. “St. Augustine’s in Hillside, IL. Plot 21. Or 12. Your father can’t remember exactly. Why on Earth would you wanna go out there, anyway? You never even met the guy.”

It was only three in the afternoon, but the sky was already getting dark. He hailed a taxi outside the Hilton and he was hurtled through the gray toward some snowy acreage of skeletons. He passed rooftops on the expressway. Rooftops some other version of himself might have lived in — might still be living in — had his father not left here. Had his father not met his mother. Had it all stacked up differently.

Eventually the cab exited the highway and drove down a long stretch of road. They passed many cemeteries. It was a road of cemeteries. The young man though there must be more dead people the further east you go. Maybe that was the reason you see so many graves when landing at JFK. East = death. West = life. He never noticed this many tombstones in California.

He rested his head against the cold window and thought about what his mother said. Or what she texted, rather. She was right. He had never met his grandfather. He had died many years before the young man was born. In fact, he had died as a relatively young man himself. But the boy felt that he intimately knew his grandpa, for his presence was ubiquitous at family gatherings; talked of as though he were a giant; a great, old American legend; a character out of time; boundless and irascible and louder than all hell. A drinker and a fighter and a lover of woman and whiskey and weekends. He was described in a fashion similar to that of a pirate. Or a gangster. Or the way liberal history teachers paint Andrew Jackson. Adjectives like barbaric, rude and ignorant existed next to ones ones like classy, intelligent and cool. Somehow, even in spite of death, his grandfather’s legend was enormous. It cast a shadow over the family. Big shoes to fill.

In moments of contemplation and loss, the young man often thought of his grandfather. He wondered how he stood up to adversity and disappointment. He wondered how he handled being broken up with. How he’d handle not getting the promotion. How he’d go about making a difficult phone call. Firing someone.

“Okay. Lawrence Henry. Lemme see. Lawrence Henry. Lawrence Henry. Lawrence Henry. Plot 21.” 

Lawrence Henry was his grandfather’s name. And plot 21 was where he was buried in the ground. The cemetery man confirmed his father’s hunch. And so the cabbie drove further into the winter, into the cemetery and soon they arrived at plot 21.

It was a small, square piece of land between four small roads and it was a good place to be at rest. It was far from the highway noise and there was a tall, tall tree which in the summer months probably provided shade and was the home to a nest of cardinals. But in February snow covered every square inch. White powder blanketed the headstones. And this was a cemetery where all the headstones were flat on the grass. No big gaudy ones with Mafioso last names. The young man wasn’t prepared for this dilemma.

“Do you have a windshield wiper? You know like a plastic brush thing with the shovel end?”

 The cabbie spoke some quick, brash arabic and handed the young man what it was he was looking for.

“Gimme a half hour. I’ll pay you double.”

And then the young man exited the cab and waltzed into the freezing cold. And then something very strange occurred. Later he would investigate — but right now he had no way of knowing just how miraculous it truly was. On plot 21 there were two-hundred and twelve bodies. Two-hundred and twelve headstones under six inches of snow. And in fact, less than one-third of the entire plot’s property was made up of marble. Two-thirds was grass; earth. And yet despite these odds (I won’t bore you with statistics), when the young man dropped to his knees to start the task of finding his grandfather’s gravestone, he hit a headstone right away. He scraped and scraped and cleared the powder and he looked at the name and it was his grandfather’s name and he almost cried. Lawrence Henry  1930 – 1980.

The young man knew better than to take stock in coincidence. He was a college man. He knew things. He knew that even Freud believed sometimes a banana was just a banana, but that no educated, logical thinker ever believed a coincidence was more than just a mathematical outlier. He knew the Universe wasn’t trying to tell him anything — that it was simply chance — and yet he found that logical rationale harder to believe than the spiritual one. It felt bigger than that. It confirmed the connection he had always felt with his grandfather.

1930 – 1980. The young man was 25. When Lawrence Henry was 25 the year was 1955. What a year. They just don’t make people like they did back then.

And then the young man stood up. And he said a silent prayer. Nothing he learned in CCD, just something short and sweet and non-denominational. Something simple. And he pressed his thumb into Lawrence’s name and he said “Hey papa. I’m Aaron.” And he walked back to the cab and he got inside and the cabbie drove him back to the Hilton. The next day he boarded a flight and he returned home. And in the spring the snow melted and cardinals returned to their tree above Lawrence Henry’s grave. And people visited him less and less often until they didn’t at all. And that was okay. That was life.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 11:05 am and is filed under Bad Prose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.