Doing 50 mph on Route 118 to Goshen yesterday, I almost pulled a screeching U-ee when I spotted the rocks.
Long-time readers of Spinning will recall, but I’ll just throw a brief summary here of my interest in finding a good rock. My pre-paid funeral arrangements include being crispy-fried and dusted into a little (preferably something pretty with a nice design) metal box and buried out in the woods with a rock atop the spot that simply is carved with “Susan”.
Ever on the lookout for the perfect rock—I just don’t think that J will bother looking too long or too hard, and worry about what the hell he’d come up with—I spotted a wonderful display at a nursery in Litchfield of stones of varied colors, textures and forms, most about a foot or two high and about a coupla-two-tree wide. Luckily there was another traveler behind me so decided that I’d stop in on the way back home, and at the very least, price them out. This good fortune of extra time gave me the chance to reason it out.
Good thing I didn’t stop and make a complete ass of myself. These rocks must have weighed in at half a ton each. I doubt that J would have appreciated dragging one of them babies out to the woods. Even if I did manage to get one home and set it someplace in the backyard to await its purpose, I have the feeling that there it would remain for all eternity, and J would simply stick me someplace in the ground close by.
In discussing these rather somber final arrangements with my friend in Goshen, I reiterated the need to find a rock prior to necessity so that her husband could do the required carving of my name. Unfortunately, we tend to get a bit silly in some conversations, and I’m beginning to worry that, as she said, I’m going to end up with someone’s old pet rock with my name scrawled on in Magic Marker.
Against his obvious lack of attention to my worries on the subject, I could only threaten J that if there is a God and Heaven, I swear I will haunt him til my rock is fully carved and nicely set in place among the maples and pines. He said, “okay.”
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology