Holding The Line
Last of a dying breed.
The first X Douglas Bunting was my grandfather, C Senior. It’s unclear where my great-grandparents got the “Douglas”; the name means “from a dark river,” but they came from untheatrical farm people, so probably they just picked the first name that scanned and wasn’t “James.” C Senior met my grandmother on a trolley car when she felt faint. He fanned her with the afternoon Inquirer. Twenty years later, he felt faint himself in the cloakroom, and murmured to his friend, “I don’t feel right.” He was dead in an hour.
I don’t know much about him. He was easygoing. He liked steak. He could really wear a tank top for a Depression-era gent. He looked like me. Only these broad, blank stones remain after two generations, worn down smooth by the mythos of an early death. This is what I had, the amiable portrait beside the door of Grandma’s bedroom, and the black leather reading chair, the hobnails kept shiny, positioned at an angle next to the Dos Passos and Catton only he truly enjoyed, and unconsciously avoided by the living. And his nose.
The second X Douglas Bunting is my uncle, C Junior, by nature’s impish design the son who looked the least like him. The son who had to become him after he had gone, when Grandma came home from the committal and got in bed with her shoes and hat still on and stayed there until the next bank holiday, and when she arose and began to cook (a mixed blessing), he “borrowed” a car and moved to Florida to wait tables. C Junior told me before I went to college that boys would try things, and that if I did not want to try those things, I should grab anything sticking off these boys and pull. And twist. And call him “to deal with the body.” He was not kidding. It was good advice. We never dug a grave together, but if I’d needed one dug, he’d have showed up. C Junior walks pitched forward towards the fight, although he’s not much for walking, anymore.
C Junior is not much for much, anymore. I have heard any number of other ways to say that in the last few weeks. One gently arranged phrasing about grips or tides is as good as another. The veil is thinning, that’s a nice one. You could also say he is hung up in it, tangled in its hem, waiting for it to tear. Pull, I want to tell him. And twist. But he probably wouldn’t know me, anymore.
The third, and last, X Douglas Bunting is I. I too have a reading chair, and while it too is avoided, that’s because a white cat has taken full and sheddy possession. C Senior also had a furry white cross to bear; his was a Manx named Ruby, and mine is a jerk named Pearl. Yesterday, because the weather had turned, Pearl agreed to share, and I listened to The RFK Tapes and made a get-well blanket. The RFK Tapes told me, among other things, that “Softly And Tenderly” played at Robert Kennedy’s funeral. It’s a lovely comforting song, although I don’t know how aptly it plays for such a young man. “Beset,” we might have said of Kennedy, but weary? At 42?
The blanket grew and began to cover Pearl. I thought about brothers, and names, and who is waiting on the other side when we, we who are weary come home. Who is at the end of that great bright hallway, to take the hand that in a last gathering of courage pulls the veil aside and lets it drop behind him.
Jesus, the hymn says. It doesn’t seem sporting to complain, if He’s put Himself in charge of hospitality. But I picture someone else, known and yet unmet, first in the line, our own holy ghost, “watching for you and for me.” With a joke at the ready about his bride’s “innovative” recipe “variations,” because you may not believe in life after death, but the hilarity of my grandmother’s lima-bean creations is eternal. It is as much a part of the home in our Bunting hearts as a chair with a cat in it.
That line, somehow, unbroken.
Y’all know my next line. Happy birthday, Don.
Tags: September 11th
I read it every year.
Damn you always make me cry. I love that as of next year I will have been reading your writing for 20 years and you still write things that are quietly beautiful and so fucking funny all in the same sentence. Thanks Sarah.
Happy Birthday, Don. Thank you, as always.
Hugs and cat cuddles for you, Sarah.
Happy birthday, Don.
Happy birthday, Don. Always good to read your thoughts on this day, Sarah.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Every year, every year.
Happy Birthday, Don. You’ve achieved a kind of immortality here in this nook of the internet, all ether and electricity.
And you know, I just realized…
Someday, somebody out there is going to be the last person alive who remembers this day as a real thing. Not reading about it or seeing movies or any other “of time, it became necessary” removals from the actual, real, thing. Like the last WWI veteran, or the last of a tribe who speaks the language, or the last occupant of a tiny town that’s faded into the roads and fields.
I hope that person, whoever they are, wherever they are, can find these posts. So they know that while they may be the last now, they weren’t always.
Happy birthday, dear Don.
Every year, Sarah. Love to you and yours.
Beautiful and funny, as always.
I too say Happy birthday, Don. I also, as every year, think of Ben’s Shadow. That story is one that stayed in my mind. I hope you’re out there, and that the hollow ache has lessend and left sweet memories.
My one and only purposeful stop online today is this.
Sometimes I close my eyes, and I am back there. It takes nothing for me to fall – for those memories to start closing in.
I remember reading “For Thou Art With Us” over and over, in the long months afterward. Your words became a haven. They are so again today.
God bless you, Sarah. God loves you.
And thank you.
“they may be the last now, they weren’t always”
Perfectly done.
And hello, everyone. Hoping for the veil of clouds to thin so I can see the Tower Lights tonight.
Happy birthday, Don.
Every year.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sars, for always remembering and for always helping us to remember.
I swear I was all right until “Pull, I want to tell him.” Then I started to cry.
Happy birthday, Don. Thank you, Sarah.
As always thanks Sarah. Happy Birthday Don.
Lovely.
Happy birthday, Don.
I also cried at that point, @Sandman. Not to be all “M’WRITING, AIN’T IT GREAT” — obviously that’s not what I mean, but sometimes these pieces take me somewhere I don’t *want* to go, but need to be. So thank you for reading them, everyone. That we’re all here together again is really something.
Every year.
Thanks for being here.
And happy birthday, Don.
Happy Birthday, Don, and thank you. If only you could know how much you are appreciated in this little corner of the internet.
And thank you too, Sars, for always remembering and for always writing something worth the feelings.
Always the first place I come on this day. Happy Birthday Don. And thank you.
Every year. Happy birthday, Don. Thanks Sars.
How beautiful and painful this is to read. Every year, I’m like “She’s not gonna tie it together, I’m almost at the end and she hasn’t even mentioned Don, noooo,” and then, of course, the ending shows how perfect it all was. Brava.
Happy birthday, Don. Wherever you are.
And thanks, Sars.
Every year. Happy Birthday Don, and thank you Sars.
Thank you, Sarah. I really loved this one.
Thanks so much for this. And I hope somewhere, a better cook than your grandmother is putting the frosting on Don’s cake.
Happy birthday, Don. Thank you, Sars.
HBD, Don. Thanks, Sarah.
@Clover Louise was actually okay on desserts! Some of the freelancing on entrees, though, oo-fah.
Happy Birthday, Don. If only you knew how, year after year, you are our glue.
Thanks Sars.
Beautiful. Happy birthday, Don.
This is beautiful. Happy Birthday, Don.
Happy birthday Don. Like so many others, I come here every year to read and remember.
My one intentional read every year. Thanks again, Sars. And, as always: Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah.
Happy birthday, Don. And thank you, Sarah.
17 years of stepping into the murky waters & each time feeling such gratitude to have this rock to stand upon.
Many thanks Ms. Sars.
Many happy birthdays Mr. Don.
::s::
Thank you, Sarah.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah. Happy birthday, Don.
happy birthday, Don. and thank you, Sarah, for this yearly reflection. all love.
Thank you, Sarah, as ever and forevermore.
Happy birthday, Don.
I didn’t know, until today, that people up north ever even sang the same hymns I grew up singing (a cappella, naturally) in tiny quavery cinderblock southern churches. There’s no reason you wouldn’t, of course, but somehow I pictured things differently. “Softly and Tenderly” in particular is one of my Dad’s favorites. He still knows the words. He doesn’t know who I am anymore; my Mom spent quite some time the other day, trying to explain to my now-profoundly-deaf Dad that this was their firstborn, but he just nodded and smiled politely and kept telling me about his sister and brother as though I’d never met them.
It comes for everyone, I guess, and the best you can hope for sometimes is that someone will be there who cares enough to remind you.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Read, read again. Tears sprung, murmurs through the comment scroll, “Oh, yes, that.” Tissues wadded up and tossed into the bin. Upper lip stiffened. September 11.
Thank you, Sarah D. Happy birthday, Don.
Love you <3
Happy birthday Don.
Please say hi to my mom when you get there, C. Junior. Heaven is so f*ing crowded.
First GMA which we were watching that morning, then here.
Thank you Sarah.
Happy Birthday Don.
Thanks, Sarah. In the category of “internet people I’ve never met, but still think of as friends”, you’re as dear as they come.
And happy birthday, Don.
I come back every year, along with all of you, and I love reading all of the comments as well as Sarah’s writing. I can’t believe it’s been 17 years.