Margaret Bailey Clark Gage - conclusion and beginning (Ch. 3, Part 1.c. - Third Preface to Part 10) I know its been a bit of time in between these things and I thought there was nothing that could top the last submission, but even your humble correspondent can be wrong. Note also that I am using Mom’s computer since mine was whacked with a dose of cyber flu which I have yet to cure and my spending the entire month of July preparing for and going to Superior Court on the matter Mom and I labored at for these many years, so my absence certainly qualifies as an “excused” absence. That being said, when last I wrote – the night before the interment – Gwen Bethel Riley and I had discovered that the Laurel Center had been taken into receivership by the State. As some of you can attest – following my giddy, Proseco and Stella Artois fueled phone calls – I was elated by this news. It was big and small: the story of that little slice of “hell on earth” has not run its full course, yet the news was very calming. I did sleep well that night. Sunday the 29th, we all gathered at St. Andrew’s by the Sea in Rye for a service officiated by David Holroyd from Christ Church. After the coffee hour, all of us sibs and families along with Gwen and her mother Bonnie, Catherine Stoltz Hammon and Christi Hammon and David and Barbara Bohn gathered at her and Dad’s grave. So far so good. Mom’s burial instructions included one odd point. When we moved here, Mom took to her natural tendency to organize what to her seemed to be the self-satisfied political actors with a zeal they had not seen before. To that affect, she seemed to be on the phone all the time. “If you don’t hang that damned thing up, we’re going to have to bury you with it,” was my father’s response when calls beyond the local calling area were charged at a per use rate. Fast forward to June 29 and refer to the burial instructions she had left with Susan. When I tell you that she had made it clear that she wanted to be buried with “a small cell phone,” know that our telecommunications universe had changed a bit – for better or for worse. Also note that these banes of our current lives have batteries loaded with mercury: not a good thing near a seacoast environmental zone. That aside, I know that my father was probably saying something like “I will regret this once and that is perpetually,” to Mom’s reply “You’re right about that !” As we started the ceremony, we pulled the battery out. I thought that it might suit all and sundry (those words are alien to legislative recording clerks) to leave it in, hoping that she might receive a call in the ill-defined future and drive my Dad into a depressive lassitude to last for all eternity. But Isabelle Potts is a good scout and fished it out. The ceremony is about to commence. We cover her ashes with the first handfuls when David takes a call on his phone. For all of us who knew her instructions – us sibs and Gwen – our looks were first “Did that just happen?” followed by laughter. “Can’t you give it a rest … just this once!” was my response. Clearly the answer was “No way Jose!” Her sense of comedic timing was always impeccable. But when we say that she is a force of nature, know that it includes making calls from the beyond. Now Dad has to live with the joke, and Chip Calcagni … watch yourself !
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:22:53 +0000
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