Monday, October 13, 2003
The Evanascent Eulogy
It’s taking forever for Moribund & Somnolent, general contractors, to get around to finishing the undergrounding of the utilities on this street. They’ve laid the trench on our side, and I think they hooked up the houses, but the poles are across the street and it’s just taking forever for the job to be finished. So the point is, they’ve repoured the sidewalks around here several times, and the last time a bunch of damn kids scrawled self-referential crap into the sidewalks, their barely literate cuneiform preserved into eternity. That’s what I thought, anyway, or at least the ‘damn kids’ part, which would have made me feel old except that this has been a stock response of mine since I was around 15. But I thought, ‘damn kids.’ Until:
Kel pointed out to me that all the carvings were the same name, by different people. One of them said “R.I.P.” She suggested that this was the work of homeless folk. There are a lot of homeless folk in our neighborhood; some are well-integrated with the conventional constituency, whereas some are stupid drunk losers who foul our parkland and litter our gardens. These guys, you never see with a book - though they sometimes tote a busted old guitar or a milk crate. They talk loud and stumble. Some have been around a long time, like ten years or more, yet continue to skate just under the surface of our tight neighborhood society; some come and go in a sunburned frenzy of mixed liquors and reeking sneakers. I think Kel’s right: the carvings in our sidewalk are a tribute to one of these, someone named “Marty.”
RIP, Marty. One of your friends actually spelled it “MANTY” - the task of memorializing you in letters was beyond his abilities. The work of each writer, though sloppy, wavering, unsure, will mark the end of your life for as long as the sidewalk exists - a life for which there likely will be no other epitaph. There will be no other acknowledgment of the extinguishment of Marty. Maybe there wasn’ t much to mourn; though my baser angels try to persuade me he was a dreg among dregs, I really am in no position to know either way. But his name now will carry forward, calling out his modest legend into eternity:
MARTiN / THE PO’REST / MAY YOU PASS
CD / PEaCe / OUt
MANTY INTERPRICES Inc
RIP / MARTY / WE WILL MISS YOU / 1-31-71 - 7-19-03
(plus two or three squares with runes, crosses, and other symbolism)
There is a square of sidewalk I like on Balboa Street, I think, between 17th and 19th somewhere, with the word “Susan” simply carved in childish script and the date 1957. All the squares around it have been torn out and replaced several times over, but this one yellowing quadrilateral has been preserved somehow as a record of one child’s day almost half a century ago. Maybe Marty’s memorial will likewise endure. But it’s not likely. They still have to trench and conduit the whole other side of the street again, I think. All that new concrete is going to get torn up. If anybody’s going to remember Marty, I don’t think it’s going to be because of this sidewalk. It was a lovely sentiment, thought inaptly executed - the medium they chose was transient and the message’s time will sortly be up. I wonder if any of the eulogists will be around to see it happen. I wonder if they would care.
Such thoughts of space and time and the meaning of life recall to my mind a parable from the services I attended recently:
A child wandered into the woods every day. His parents were amused, then curious, then got worried. “Why,” they asked, “do you wander in the woods every day?” “To find God,” the child responded. The parents laughed indulgently before explaining, “You don’t have to go into the woods to find God - God is the same everywhere.” The child listened, thought, and then replied, “Perhaps God is the same everywhere - but I’m not.”
I go to LA on Wednesday for the day - bargaining is beginning again. I have non-metallic shoes and a dufflebag full of smiles for the other passengers on the plane. DON’T MAKE ME USE THEM. They have to last all week.
