Like so many folks before me I went in search of my heroes, who happen to be dead. I have not yet been back to my grandfather's graves though I intend to fully before making any wild and unchangeable life choices like moving west and starting new if that is what I choose to do. Rather than dig up those old thoughts, I, instead went to see about the grave of another hero of mine. Mr. Jack Kerouac. The long dead poet-preacher of American prose who lies entombed at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, MA. Perhaps it was curiosity or boredom or what seemed like a good idea at the time, in fact, I struggled, the same ways I struggle now, later that night when I mentioned that I'd gone to a friend over dinner. She looked at me strange like maybe I had 9 heads full of mouths and ears and eyes, like a freak and I realized that it was no use and that I was doomed to be misunderstood.
The grass was worn to dirt by footprints and joints lay around it like a wreath. Many people had been there before. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg for 2 I know for sure. The rest, I'm sure, were some sorry sort like me. It is a simple grave, gray slate in the grass with the epitaph: "He Honored Life" over it. There was gray sky above it and the low rolling sound of traffic going by. The skies were threatening rain or snow or some precipitation per the daily meteorological dealings but nothing seemed to come out of it and I thought of the Dylan song where he goes, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" and I might agree sometimes. I can. It was quiet and empty there and I felt like the only bee with any buzz for ten-thousand miles as a I stood over his grave.
I said a quiet prayer and read a passage from The Subterraneans and spoke a quiet thanks and praise and stood idly by observing the surroundings and the peacefulness of the place. Such an end for such a man. A human being who went all over, restless-souled and so wound-up with wanderlust that he never truly settled anywhere with happiness in his heart, always, it seemed he'd make the final, fatal dash for the depths of Mexico and perhaps on into Bolivia or the lower depths of Chile and beyond, maybe ending in an ancient long forgotten and lost catacomb in the ices of Antarctica. Maybe in another life.
Before I knew it I was turning back to the car and to going on back home. Saturday had been killed. But not before I decided to turn the day into another kind of adventure and I drove back the scenic route through Burlington and Lexington and Arlington, up to Lancaster Rd. and the old blue house where I was tiny and young once and ran wild from sunrise to dusk light and funny to see that the street that once seemed an eternity was like a brief, narrow, corridor for time to pass through and all the years between the last time I'd been there to now seemed a lifetime and the "what-if's" crept into my mind and I pushed them back and drove on to where the old Dallin Elementary School was, where the author Avi came to speak once to our class, and where I was taught and brought up and saw lightning strike a telephone pole from the window of my 4th Grade classroom and how I've never mentioned that moment or thought of it till just now, but I can remember sitting there with the thunder going and the lightning flashing outside and my mind turned away from the lesson and teacher and to nature and then the blast of lighting that lit the telephone line on fire and wondering if I'd caused the whole thing to happen, if I'd willed it with magic or if it just was what was supposed to happen, what would always happen, what had to happen and couldn't happen, wouldn't happen any other way. I drove by, stopping momentarily to look at the great soccer fields and swing sets behind the school that were still there. The old school had been torn down and transformed. It looked like any Elementary school. It wasn't mine anymore. Nothing there was. Not even my grandparent's old house on Martin St. with it's new back deck. Things change and I took Mystic Parkway back to Boston and home.
