cemetery – Tess Perko's Blog

Turning Ordinary Events into Writing

I used to think that my life was too ordinary for fostering ideas for writing. But finally, I realized that the best story-telling is about human nature itself. That’s when I started looking for writing ideas everywhere and every day.

In this blog post, I share five ordinary life events that I turned into stories or posts.

The Pancake Contest

When I was five years old, I competed against my brother Don in a pancake contest. The contest happened at home at breakfast time. My mother made as many pancakes as we could eat. My brother lost the contest and I won by one pancake.

Fifty years later, I turned this ordinary childhood event into a funny story with descriptions of my brother groaning in pain and of me raising my arms in victory.

A Picture of a Road Bike

One day at 5 p.m., my son sent me a picture of the handlebars of his new trail bike. By 6 p.m., it was dark outside, and I started to wonder if he was biking out in the hills in darkness. Luckily, he wasn’t.

I wondered what it would be like if a bicyclist did get caught in the middle of the hills in the dark. I wrote a story about a girl who starts her bike ride at dusk and gets distracted when she finds a tarantula. She ends up in a valley at nightfall and has to find her way back to the deserted parking lot while the night wildlife threatens her safety.

Taking a Stuffed Bear to a Cemetery

A week after my mother died, my brother texted me and my siblings to tell me that he took a stuffed bear with him to visit her grave. The bear was created from clothes that my mother once wore.

I invented a story about this visit, which I titled Rain. The story describes a man driving a truck to the cemetery to see his mother as it rains. When he arrives, the rain stops. He thinks about how his siblings have connected via text messages since his mother died. He puts the bear next to her tombstone and says a prayer. As he drives away, the rain starts again.

A Hike in San Francisco

A few years ago, I joined a Meetup group that hosted walks all over San Francisco. One walk started at the Embarcadero and crossed the city from east to west for seven miles until we reached Land’s End. Another hike circled the exclusive neighborhoods of Twin Peaks and climbed up to the Sutro Tower, one of the highest points in the city.

When I was writing my novel Whistle, I used these hiking experiences in one chapter to help my protagonist escape the sorrow of her home after her mother dies. She walks along the ocean to Golden Gate Park.

Filbert Street Steps and Graffiti

When my friend came to town, I met her in San Francisco to climb the Filbert Street Steps. This staircase covers three ascending blocks from Sansome Street to Coit Tower and includes well over two hundred steps. On my way to the city in Oakland, I saw some graffiti on an overpass that said “Resist Authority.”

I turned the staircase and graffiti experiences into a short commentary about how I like to read graffiti so I can hear what the needs of people are. This post received a lot of attention on my blog. It seems like many people identified with it.

Now, I have a fertile writing attitude. My whole life is a garden of ideas, waiting for my creativity to take them from a personal experience into the world.

Getting Ghosted at the Paris Cemetery

My husband and I got to Paris three days before our tour of France was to begin. Our goal was for both of us to overcome jetlag before the tour started and to see parts of Paris not on the tour.

I had been to the Paris catacombs the last time I visited Paris with my daughter. These are underground alleys beneath the city to where thousands of bodies were transferred from cemeteries above ground as Paris expanded. For miles under the city, tourists can walk past bones piled up against the walls in neat displays. Hip bones are in one place, skulls in another.

One place I had never been before, though, was the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, known for the graves of dozens of famous people from all over the globe. We took a taxi ride to the cemetery’s entrance at 16 Rue de Repos in the 20^th Arrondissement, about a half hour ride from our hotel in Bercy.

The entrance was a massive olive-green set of doors framed by wreaths. On both sides, the doors were flanked by two white granite columns topped with the carving of an hour glass circled by angel wings. The doors were open and, inside, we could see several erect tall tree trunks with leafy branches. In-between the trees, blackened marble mausoleums and statues beckoned to us.

I had a map of the cemetery from my Frommer’s Easy Guide to Paris, so I felt well-prepared to find many famous graves including Frédéric Chopin, the renowned Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period who lived half his life in Paris, and Oscar Wilde, the provocative Irish poet and playwright. But since we entered through the main gate, I decided we would start by finding the grave of Camille Pissarro, who was known for his Impressionist and Neo-impressionist paintings.

The cemetery has a few paved paths and dozens of tiny dirt paths that take visitors past the graves. To find Pissarro, we took a right just inside the gate to walk along the west perimeter of the cemetery’s wall. After several steps, sure enough, we found Pissarro’s crypt where at least eight family members were buried. The names were listed on a grand rounded slab of white marble with two angel wings sticking out at the top.

Nearby Pissarro, my map indicated that the 12^th century lovers, Héloise and Abélard, were buried, their remains brought to the cemetery in 1817 from Brittany. We found their monument which is an openwork Gothic Chapel from an abbey in southwestern France. Underneath the roof are two reposing statues of the tragic lovers who were forced apart by their families and spent the rest of their lives writing letters of love.

After finding the tombs of these lovers, our luck evaporated. According to my map, the Rothschild family plot was nearby. Since the French Rothschilds were the founders of a banking dynasty in France, I expected their tomb to be colossal and easy to find. We scanned the names on several large monuments beside the dirt path, but we never found them. We found ourselves alone on the claustrophobic dirt path edging the gargantuan cemetery wall, shivered at the thought of being amongst more deceased souls than live ones, so gave up our search for the Rothschilds.

We took a teeny side path to reach Chemin Serre, a wider path than the lonely one we had just left, but still somber from the shade of countless trees which blocked out the view of the sky. Somewhere on this path was the grave of one of the most famous souls in the cemetery, the 1960s rock star Jim Morrison. According to my guide book, Morrison’s grave is the most visited in the grounds and, ever since he died, people have made pilgrimages to see his tomb, leaving behind graffiti, trash, and samples of drugs. We searched for the fenced-in tomb, which is supposedly an unexceptional relic. We asked passers-by if they knew where the grave was, and they pointed us in the right direction. We couldn’t find it. We looked for a grave that had a crowd of people gazing at it, but couldn’t find either a crowd or the famed resting place. We gave up.

I was probably most excited about seeing the tomb of Oscar Wilde since I am a fan of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s story about a man that has his portrait painted and then sells his soul so he never loses his youth; instead, his portrait ages and records the sins of his amoral life. To reach Wilde’s grave, a visitor has to walk up the hill to the top of the cemetery, and my husband was unwilling to do this. Leaving him sitting on a bench on a popular paved pathway, I started ascending the hill. Oscar’s grave was at the juncture of Avenue Carette and Avenue Circulaire. I walked, I inhaled through my nostrils and out through my mouth to regulate my breathing as I ascended the steep terrain. I passed tombs of men surrounded by statues of weeping women, which I thought was a bit arrogant on their part.

I discovered the mausoleum of the Monet family, which may or may not be related to the impressionist artist Claude Monet who is buried in Giverny. I also found a crypt for the Macon family which I hoped was related to Emmanuel Macon, the French president. Unfortunately, though, when I reached the spot where I thought Oscar Wilde was buried, I couldn’t find him. I looked up at the grand crypts. I read the names on several flat tombs, but Wilde’s final resting place eluded me.

I next took the opportunity to find the side-by-side tombs of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were also supposed to be buried at the top of the cemetery on Avenue Circulaire. Gerturde Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector who hosted a salon for writers and artists in Paris. Toklas was her long-time lover. Where were they? Did I have to step over graves to find them hidden in the middle of a mass of deceased humanity? I’ll never know because I gave up and went to join my own lover who was still sitting on his bench watching other people struggle with their maps.

Together, we found a memorial for the 6,000 Jews who died in World War II in the German concentration camps. We also discovered a crypt for the Famille Charlemagne, and since the ancient King of the Franks had 18 children, I know he certainly has descendants who are now buried in this Paris cemetery.

The last person I wanted to find was Frédéric Chopin, the Polish composer that I mentioned earlier. According to my almost useless map, he was buried at the juncture of three dirt paths a short walk away from the Monument aux Morts, a grandiose marble monument to the dead with several grieving statues. I left my husband again, sitting on a bench along the circular road that surrounds the monument, and, again, I traipsed uphill to find Chopin. Standing on the path, I searched every name on the tombstones near the juncture. No Chopin. Feeling desperate, I courageously scooted between the tightly packed graves to read the graves behind them. No. I hurriedly got out of there. Chopin didn’t want to be found.

Back at the entrance to the cemetery, I read that the cemetery was named after a Jesuit priest, a confessor for King Louise XIV, who lived in a house on the property before the cemetery was built. In 1804, Napolean bought the land so that all Parisiens could be buried, no matter their race or religion. I also learned that, today, over 1 million bodies and cremains are buried in the cemetery. That made me feel better. In the midst of a million ghosts, most of the ones I wanted to see were the ghosts too shy to do any spooking.

Rain

Photo by Ahmed Zayad on Unsplash

When Don woke up, it was raining. The water that he ran in the tub sounded like rain chortling out of a storm pipe. The water that streamed from the kitchen faucet for his tea beat into the kettle like rain on a wheelbarrow left out in the yard. Rain. Rain. Rain. It had rained for months.

Don’s mother had died at 10:05 a.m. on the same morning that Don worked his last day. He was looking forward to retirement, and one thing he would do more was spend time with his mother—playing Scrabble, going out for hamburgers for lunch, driving her past her old house where prolific flowers signaled the change of seasons.

At 10:06 on the day she died, the rain started. He had kissed her on the forehead as she lay quiet in her hospital bed, checked to see if she was safe, and slipped out of the room to live the rest of his life without her.

Claire had managed the funeral and service arrangements which were beautiful. On the day Mom was buried, the sun came out for a couple hours—just enough time for Mom’s ten children to say their prayers and lay red roses on her casket. When the casket was lowed into the ground and the earth filled in her vacancy, the grounds men laid the large spray of red roses over the dirt.

Then the rain began again. It rained while they cleaned out Mom’s room at the assisted living home. Maddy took all their mother’s clothes home in garbage bags. A few weeks later, she knocked on Don’s door and handed him a teddy bear. The bear was blue and green and peach and red, made from pieces of Mom’s shirts, pants, and dresses. It looked both happy and sad as Don sat it on the couch in his living room.

Soon, the group texts began. Don shared memories of his mother with his nine siblings every day. Old memories. Vague memories. Disputed memories. Sunny memories. Rainy memories.

Some people in the text posted pictures of what they made for breakfast. Don posted pictures of his new seedlings and old pumpkins. He talked about his clocks inherited from Mom and Dad. Claire posted perfect plates of salmon dinners. Rita identified the birds that Maddy found in her garden by looking them up in her bird bible. Beatrice posted old photos of Mom from her twenties when she was thin, before she had ten children.

The siblings discovered each other again. Most of them had moved out of town since their childhood, and their communication had been through Mom for the most part. Through their texts, they found out that Don had the best green thumb, Claire grew flowers but not vegetables, Rita was a bird and owl watcher, Maddie loved wine and dessert most of all, Beatrice was just starting a walking routine, Minnie continuously created new jam recipes, Jim was the handyman at his job, Carol had learned how to play guitar, Ron still told the best jokes, and Geo wrote poetry in his spare time.

The texts started usually around 7 a.m. in the morning and lasted until the last sibling drifted off to bed. Good mornings. Breakfast recipes. Descriptions of walks. Flower postings. Loaves of bread. Jars of jam. Bowls of soup. Directions to parks. Comments on the news. Revelations about hobbies. Progress on quilts, puzzles, and charity projects. Movie recommendations and dinner plans. All these subjects and pictures streamed between the ten children that Mom left behind.

A few months later, the rain stopped. The sun came out like a herald of good news, and Don woke up to the birds chirping outside his bedroom window.

When he wandered out into his living room, he saw his colorful teddy bear leaning over on its side and bent down to sit it upright, and, as he did, the sun blazed through the window and lit up the bear in a shaft of light.

“Let’s go visit Mom, today,” Don said to his bear. “The sun is out and I know she’ll be happy to see us.”

Half an hour later, after an oatmeal breakfast and coffee with chocolate, Don put the bear in the passenger seat of his blue truck, and drove to the cemetery.

When he got there, the sun streamed like yellow curtains through the oak trees whose branches spread over the graves like kind arms. The green grass, which covered the shallow hills and valleys, glistened with diamonds of left-over rain.

Don drove his truck onto the center road and stopped it in front of his parents’ graves. There they were—lying side by side like happy campers in sleeping bags. Their gravestone rose from the top of their plots like a crown, and Don noticed that one of his siblings had stuck some colorful plastic flowers into the metal vase in front of the headstone.

Don knelt down in the middle of his two parent’s plots, reached out, and placed his teddy bear on his mother’s side of the stone near the flowers.

He paused for a few minutes, furrowed his brow, then recited the Hail Mary prayer, and his words wafted through the cemetery like a low whisper. When he finished praying, he looked up at his teddy sitting quietly.

“You can’t stay here,” he said. “We’re just visiting. You and I have to go home and live some more.”

Don looked at the words of his mother’s name on the head stone and the dates of her birth and death. 92 years long. Somehow, not long enough.

“Thank you for giving me life, Mom,” Don said, placing his hand on his heart gently.

He reached over, lifted his teddy bear from the ledge beside the plastic flowers, and held the bear against his bent frame.

“I’m always here, Mom, for you, just as you were always here for me.” Then Don slowly stood up from the ground, brushed the wet grass off his jeans, and walked back to his truck.

When he got into his seat, he checked his phone to see if any of his siblings had posted another message. A few rain drops fell onto the windshield as he drove away.