PopWars

One of the last pieces of life’s puzzle is a prepaid funeral arrangement. If we had any sense we would be shopping for ourselves but we were helping my parents choose between two nearby places that we chose from a list that came from a friend of my father’s. One was moderately priced and one was considerably cheaper.

My parents have chosen a green burial with a shroud and no embalmment, a “direct burial” in funeral home jargon, basically pick up, preparation and delivery to the cemetery, but one place was about twice the cost of the other. So we read a lot into the transaction in these short meetings.

Both salesmen were late. We were late for both appointments as well but the salesmen were later. I don’t hold that against them. One was slick and well spoken. One was a kid who my father said looked like he just washed his hands and sat down. The slicker one slipped when he said they would probably just wrap the bodies in a sheet unless we provided our own shrowd. And the kid didn’t do himself any favors when he got off on a logistical tangent about how they dig graves when you’re buried next to someone else. “They dig slowly with the back hoe and if they hit the top of a casket they move over a bit.” I’m sure we were all picturing a shovel going through whichever corpse went in the ground first.

I’d go with the kid but my dad will call the shots. After the meetings we headed down to to Nick’s where my mother, Peggi and I all ordered the “Italian Special.”

We are attending to our neighbor’s fish while they out of town. When the water temperature reaches 45 degrees the fish go into hibernation and lose their interest in food. The pond temp was right on the cusp when our neighbors left. Peggi sprinkled the food in this morning and they ignored it. It’s 38 degrees out there but we gain an hour tonight so I’m not complaining.

Gerry and Diana Brinkman were in full costume last night at Atlas Eats, Gerry as kitchen manager and Diane as maître d’. Their daughter is now the head chef and last night’s menu theme was Spain. The fixed price menu is served two times and we were there for the late shift. The tapas portion included Gerry’s “Tortilla Espagnola,” a recipe he shared with City Newspaper back when he was running the Rochester Club restaurant. Spain’s national dish, it is incredibly simple but tricky to do right. We still have that clipping and follow his recipe whenever we throw a party. Diana gave us some Smarties as a nightcap.

We finished the night up near the lake at Mastrella’s in Sea Breeze. We had not been in there since the seventies when we saw a five foot Elvis impersonator bring the house down. This bar is like a movie set. I couldn’t tell who was in costume and who wasn’t. I love not being able to make that distinction. It was a perfect Halloween.

My current dentist has a cute little bulldog that he keeps in the office. It seems a bit unprofessional but he pulls it off. His office is out in Webster where I used to be a patient of his father. I went out with that guy’s receptionist. The elder recommended I see Dr. Cupolo for a bridge and I liked Rocco so much I switched to him. Dr Cupolo had an interest in a bagel store in Culver Ridge for while and his son ran the Victor Grilling Company. Today his son owns Rocco, a great downtown Italian eatery. The place is named for his father.

My mom used to take the six of us (my youngest sister had not yet arrived) up to Dr. Cleary’s office in the Medical Arts Building on Alexander Street. His office was on the sixth floor with a great view of the Emergency Department of the old Genesee Hospital. They had an elevator operator back then. We’d wait our turn while we read Highlights (Find Ten Things Wrong With This Picture), and ran up and down the stairway of the place. There was a soda fountain downstairs in the pharmacy but we never had any money for that.

Dr. Cleary was old school. No novocaine. “Hang on,” he would tell us as he swung that old, slow-speed drill with a 1/4 inch bit around. He was a Red Wings fan so we talked baseball and between patients he would smoke cigarettes in the office.

I just rode my bike over to the hospital where my mom spent last night. She has a few blood clots that they are attending to but she slept well. When I walked in she had just finished a breakfast of pancakes and bacon.

Someone had looked at the weather and warned us we had better get going unless we wanted to get caught in the rain. It was our second day in Maine and of course we were headed out for another walk, this time in the opposite direction of yesterday’s adventure, out to Pemaquid Point and its storied lighthouse. Years ago my father took a watercolor class near here and they sat on the rocks at the end of the point while looking back at the lighthouse. He has the painting on the wall in his art room. The weather remained sunny. The day was filled with magic.

We found a spot where the tide had rolled large round rocks back and forth thousands of times wearing tracks in the large stone surface and rounding the bowling balls of the gods. The lanes ran downhill out into the sea and diminished into the sun. We got lost in the nonstop sound of the waves so much so that I considered infinity. Is this what afterlife looks like? Have we already moved on?

Back at Alice and Julio’s we decided not to go anywhere for dinner. Jeff prepared a knock vegetable pasta dish from on-hand ingredients. We never left the table. The night went on forever. We were lost in the rhythms of Julio’s animated Castilian pronunciation. I had a view of three of Alice’s paintings, some of my favorites. Peggi asked Julio, who has split his life two if he dreamed in Spanish or English and Julio said “both, depending on where he is in the dream.”