Since I had to leave early the next morning for a conference in Cleveland, Big Man and I decided to honor our beloved dead (or, this being MY hometown and not his, honor MY beloved dead) on Halloween instead of All Saints. To prepare for the traditional cemetery visits, we went first to a local grocery store and got 2 beautiful chrysanthemum pots in bright orange.
Of course, we had to go inside the store to make the purchase; back in the day, stores would be so busy with the All Saints chrysanthemum traffic that many stores would set up canopies and tents in the parking lot, so you wouldn't have to go inside the store, or even leave your car. You would just pull up, point to what pot or arrangement you wanted, pay the clerk, and drive to the cemetery.
This was the first time for me to be inside St. Vincent de Paul in the Upper Ninth Ward, my father's family cemetery, since the storm. I was nervous about it -- I had such lovely memories of doing All Saints with my father and my son for years. And then, after my dad died, there was that never-to-be-forgotten All Saints when Stevie and I went to the cemetery for the first time without "Pop-Pop" and we both had the strongest physical feeling of his presence. I remember that as we were driving away, I asked my son, "Lemme ask you, did anything strange happen back there?" and he came back with "You mean when Pop-Pop came?" Yeah, that was what I meant.
We drove through the devastated neighborhoods around the cemetery, the places where my father and uncles had grown up, the neighborhood where we used to visit my grandparents when I was a girl. Things were a mess, with here and there a home being worked on or one finished and looking spiffy, but mostly it was abandoned and falling-down houses and businesses and some FEMA trailers. It was so sad.
When we arrived at St. Vincent, I saw that the gate that we had always used before, a side entrance, was padlocked, so we went around to the front gate. I led Big Man down the rows to our family vault. We've never been well-off, so the family tomb is what is called an "oven vault" at the top level across from the cemetery wall -- which turns out to have been a kind of blessing, since almost all the graves below that level were damaged by the pitiless flood waters. Row after row showed shattered marble face plates lying face down on the concrete. In one corner, cemetery workers had piled pieces of broken stones and ornaments. (For later sorting and replacement? One could only hope.)
So there it was, as always high above my head. I told Big Man how each year we would have to fetch the cemetery ladder in order to reach the shelf in front of the family vault, how we would carefully sweep it off and place the flowers, how one year my son had brought a special rock form his collection to place there and which we found, safe and sound, on a visit 3 years later. I looked for that darn ladder but of course it was no longer in the spot it used to be. Big Man is tall enough, however, so he did the honors, and held me close as we stepped back to look at it. I couldn't help it, I introduced my father to Big Man and said how happy I was to be home, and Big Man promised Barney that he would take good care of me.
Walking back to the car, I was down-hearted at all the damage in the cemetery. We don't have money in New Orleans to fix schools and libraries and hospitals and the historic famous cemeteries -- where will funds come from to repair poor old St. Vincent de Paul in this working-class neighborhood? It doesn't seem likely.
From there, we drove to the end of Canal Street to the Egyptian Revival gates of the cemetery where the founding father of the church I serve is buried. I couldn't forget our old parson! The second pot of chrysanthemums was for him. His tomb is part of a volunteer fire company, since he was their chaplain, and I placed the pot near his name. I told Big Man some of the stories about him -- how when he was first called to the church in the 1830's they asked him to preach without notes, and he freaked out; how his preaching was so famous folks said you couldn't visit New Orleans without hearing him; how he had been the church's longest serving minister. We wandered around the beautiful cemetery, and found quite by accident a Chinese Society tomb from the late 1890s, a weird and wonderful amalgamation of Chinese and New Orleans styling.
As we left, we noticed a herbal-shop cum voodoo shop cum coffee shop across Canal -- this proved irresistable and we went over and had great coffee while browsig their selections of incense, High John the Conqueror root, home-made candy, and local folk art. I asked for the restroom, and was directed down a long gallery that fronted onto another cemetery. The ladies room was painted shocking pink, had more folk art inside, and I couldn't get the door unlocked when I was done. I had a moment of panic about being trapped in a restroom by a cemetery for who knows how long, but eventually the door came loose.
All in all, a good day. it is good to keep up the old customs and traditions, even if you have to fudge a bit by one day.
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