Did I ever tell you the story about the Franciscan Italian monks, when I got lost on my way home, from Saratoga Springs?
The New Jersey Turnpike is a highway that intimidates me, even today… I was traveling back from an all women writers conference at Skidmore College, a glorious week of discovery that I too had sisters… and that they too had plans to tell their stories. My plan for that moment though, was to cut across slightly towards the west and come home to the Eastern Shore of Maryland via Princeton – a town I liked.
Well, I got lost fast and soon entered a town in the state of New Jersey… looking for a way back home.
Off the main highway, suddenly driving down this road – steadily deeper into local neighborhoods, Black, first, then South American Latin and more Latin, then European Latin Italian. I felt city safe then, in what we call ethnic neighborhoods, further and further away from the commercial, the links to the networks of main stream travel, the I 87, I 90, the federal highways…
I was in a scene in a movie, I had silver bracelets on me, rings, native American necklaces. I was high from my recent communion with all the marvels of discovery that we were all one, the sisters, one hand on the wheel, left arm hanging out the window, happy… maybe even singing out loud.
Traveling though the barbecues, grits, delicious tacos, poblanos rellenos, pizza, pasta, lasagna. Then, chunks of dilapidated boarded buildings, faded billboards from failed front store business and finance propositions, liquor stores, occasional men and women wavering, street dogs, I remember something close to fear and I thought, no, I have to find my way home, this is not safe… they will steal my silver.
The cemetery, the parking, the caretaker, the tall monk and the fat short one… jolly cheeks. The funeral, the crying out loud. The loss in return home.
I kept on going, turned on the first right I could find and entered a cemetery. An old cemetery, with stone structures and gargoyles.
Soon flashing lights behind me and a pickup truck drives ahead and blocks me. Follow me, he says. I am caught, I think, finally caught! I broke the law, broke it, and no longer can hide… and fly just below the radar. It is over! My immigrant free ride is over.
He is wearing a hat, a white shirt, jeans, boots and says follow me, so I do, many turns inside this enormous mausoleum filled cemetery. Old stone, narrow lanes, a feel of sacred ancient stuff.
Park here and wait for me! So, I did. Heart thumbing.
He drove back to the entrance and returned in an instant, leading a long caravan with a grey hearse and dozens of black cars… Two hooded men came out of the first car, one very tall and gangly, the second one short and plump, both dressed in brown robes, tied at the waist with what looked like beige rope.
Then they came out, women, men and children, all dressed in what seemed to me to be their finest, the women in black high heels, black stockings, shiny garments, black veils over high hairdos, the men in black suits and thin ties. The casket descending, and the loud crying, so strangely familiar to me, yet so unknown.
Not from my own family, for sure, we never cried, but a crying now for what is no longer to be here, and then to let it be where it will go? I had learned to admire and love the howling that women were capable of howling in many places in the vast and diverse worlds of what we, in “America and the West” call Africa.
The short priest was the director and he consoled and hugged many of the women, shook hands and embraced the men. The tall monk stayed to the side, as the silent presence. They all cried.
I was still frozen in my assigned parking space, peeking at what was happening, a few graves to my right.
Soon it was all done. My link back to the New Jersey highway was half a block down the road, he told me, to the right. He was right. The guy who told me what to do was the old cemetery caretaker! One of my favorite science fiction tales from way before places the wise ones as janitors and caretakers inside public bathrooms… Bus and train stations remind me of that. Not airports…
I had a camera, a small one that I could hide in my hand, I WANTED TO TAKE PICTURES, wanted to take pictures… describe the funeral, the crying, but the feeling of intrusion, even then, that I, as a writer, would ever write this up. Like with photography, it did not seem fair for me to intrude to that extent. Ah, but it was so tempting… I did write a piece about it and can no longer find the copy.
So, this morning, maybe twenty years later, I researched New Jersey maps, the turnpike, the possible routes to see if at least I could find the town where I got lost… I researched the Catholic orders of monks who dress in brown robes in New Jersey, Franciscans and Salesians. Salesians are introverts and into discovery from inward conversions and silences, while Franciscans find their ways to eternal life through community… inspired by good old St. Francis of Assisi…1
I asked the wizard for clues to old cemeteries… to Italian parishes… I read Sunday bible school lunch menus, I saw pictures of dogs and cats, current advertising lures for prayer.
It was fun to look at the possible geology of the place, trying to figure out what kind of stone would endure the times in such majestic tombstones I saw there.
Memory was my best clue – or more truthfully stated, my intuition and street view google maps told me that I may have been traveling deep along Totowa Avenue, in the town of Totowa, in New Jersey…
I have not been inside many churches or gone to funerals. Some deep aversion to organized religion kept me away. When my husband died, in 2007, a few years after the Totowa encounter, we offered a Fellinian party, sailing the river and spreading his ashes in the waters, as he wanted it. A complete feast towards life and a complete disaster, towards honoring death, depending on your point of view.
Today I believe I could try to enter a church again, and even attend a funeral. That encounter in Totowa, in New Jersey remains… that sense of community, where the praying fields of life and death were made a bit more real to me
and, at the end of this particular time
it is not about moving or change
- that is a given. -
it is more about moving and change in a particular manner
every single paratactic moment, in grace
it is about a take in cinema, flash, point, swish
and hwishh of eternal oceans.
My best introduction to group prayer 101 was given to us by Rosa, a Guatemalan woman writer who insisted we need to take what we need to fill our self first, then open and offer what we have in excess to share with the world.
oh this is a beauty! I love this!!
What an experience! Erica, did this feel, as it read, to have been orchestrated by spirits? This line makes me think so: "One of my favorite science fiction tales from way before places the wise ones as janitors and caretakers inside public bathrooms..." Just wonderful.