THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS!! YOU ROCK!

Taking off from Philadelphia, and heading towards the green of Vermont!

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Incident from the Day of the Dead
by Morton Marcus

Miguel told me he had been home alone for two hours, studying. It was in Guanajuato when he was twelve years old, on the Day of the Dead, and his mother and sisters had gone to tidy his father and grandparents’ graves.

He didn’t remember why he looked from his book on the dining room table to the sideboard in the corner, where his baby sister had surrounded the makeshift altar with the candies his grandmother liked so much and the small dark cigars his father and grandfather were so fond of. It was probably a sound of some sort, he said, a chair creaking maybe. But when he looked, there was his father, turned the other way, holding a cigar under his nose, sideways, like a flute, sniffing the length of it as he did when he was alive.

The old man was so intent on the cigar, his face serious, that he didn’t notice Miguel at first. He was sitting on a dining room chair, in the black suit he had been buried in, and was leaning toward the altar, as if he had just picked up the cigar. Then he tensed and a moment later turned toward Miguel, and they sat that way, looking at each other across the table in the late afternoon light. And that’s how Miguel knew, he said, that only a table separates the living from the dead.

“What did you do then?” I asked.

Miguel shook his head.

We had been talking for hours about one thing and another, sipping beer at my kitchen table, while the household slept and the night wind buffeted the tiny house on the Northern California coast. Our talk had wandered onto the brushes we had had with the dead, and he had told this story about his father, and now it was clear he had said all he intended to say.

“That’s it?” I asked. “Nothing more?”

“No. Nothing.”

We sat in silence for several moments. Just as he and his father had, I thought, and I said aloud to continue the conversation, “How long did you sit that way?”

He shrugged. “My mother and sisters returned soon after.”

“And he was gone then?”

He clenched his jaws and looked past me toward the window.

I knew that if I continued my questioning I would be invading a reserve in him that I had learned to respect, and I must admit that I was too timid or unwilling to hurl myself at the barricade of facial expressions he had thrown up between us, and there the matter ended.

But I also felt that I had somehow failed, failed in the same way Miguel and his father had failed with each other.

At the same time, I felt that the incident was not finished. Miguel had told me the story, and somehow the story and the telling and what had just occurred at my kitchen table were now joined in a single event. It made no difference if Miguel and I never spoke of the incident again, or if my insistence had destroyed our friendship, which, I’m relieved to say, it did not.

It was as though the story told me in a California kitchen by a middle-aged man about an incident from his childhood in Mexico now included me, was somehow mine as much as it was his, and continued from that point, having less and less to do with our friendship, or even us. His reticence and my timidity, both our failures, and his failure with his father and his father’s failure with him, were what the story was about.

And now, dear reader, just as I became part of the story Miguel told me, so you have become part of the story, too. It is as if we sat across from each other at a kitchen table, although I am no longer here and possibly wrote these words years ago. I may even no longer be alive. You, however, read these words as if I am sitting here with you, and that has allowed me to include you in the tale, a tale whose telling beyond this point I am either unwilling or unable to provide.

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http://www.mortonmarcus.com/

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