Epitaphs & Losing your marbles

Back in the ‘70s I recall listening to the CBC radio comedy Dr. Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show.  One skit they did was about pet funerals!  One of the lines was “Have you considered an appropriate epitaph—something like ‘He ain’t around, he’s in the ground.’”

William Butler Yeats’ epitaph is his own lines “Cast a cold eye/On life and death,/Horseman, pass by.” Remember Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s sister who married an English nobleman and was killed in a plane crash? I’ve always liked her epitaph “Joy she gave, joy she has.” I also like Cecil Day-Lewis’ own epitaph “Shall I be gone long?” Robert Frost suggested for his epitaph “He had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” And Dorothy Parker suggested “Excuse my dust.”  Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph is lines he wrote when he was young:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer

Like the Cover of an old Book

Its contents torn out,

And stript of its Lettering and Guilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms,

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ’d,

Appear once more

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and amended by the Author.

I think I’d like a Chinese-style “tree burial,” where they cremate you then plant a tree over your ashes.  If they want to put up an inscription plaque it should be the Chinese proverb “Our ancestors planted trees, we sit in the shade.”

Our other subject this week is “Losing all your marbles.” Just now I’m reading Alexandre Dumas’ mega-novel The Count of Monte Cristo.  It’s about a guy who gets framed and becomes a political prisoner for fourteen years.  Then he makes an incredible escape and finds a huge treasure.  Eventually he sets about getting even with the people who got him sent up.  He does that by cleverly manipulating things so that they ultimately destroy themselves!  The worst of his enemies has the worst fate, going insane in the end.  You’re bound to wonder, Is what the hero does to him worse than what he did?  In one of the Kill Bill movies, the Japanese sword-maker warns a vengeful Uma Thurman, “You may think of revenge as a road, but it’s more like a forest.” That movie came out about the same time as 9/11, which prompted a pretty rash vengeance campaign by the American government… 

The Trans-Canada Highway

 

I grew up in the town of Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick.  The nearby Trans-Canada Highway came near there around the time I was born.  It was just a few lanes wide and didn’t get expanded into a freeway till the mid-1990s, by which time I no longer lived there.

Driving west, you’d ascend Beech Hill and go a length through the woods to Memramcook, where the road descended to a river valley with a gravel quarry.  Then you’d go back uphill and soon get to the Moncton area, where you’d enter the city or go even further, on routes that took you to west to Fredericton and northwest to Quebec, or southwest to St. John and west to Maine.

Driving east, you’d go past the Tantramar River with its tidal dam, and a group of radio towers that were used by the Canadian Northern Service back then for shortwave broadcasts. The land is flat and marshy there, and the railway runs parallel to the road.  Then you’d climb a ridge to Aulac.  The National Historic Park at Fort Beausejour was there, along with a tourist information centre and a place that sold apples every fall. (I think they have an EV charging station there now!)

There one branch of the Trans-Canada Highway goes east to Northumberland Strait.  Our summer cottage was in that direction, and further on was the ferry to Prince Edward Island. (There’s a bridge there now, but it was only built after I left.)

The other branch goes south to Nova Scotia.  You’d descend to more of the marshy flatland, and the Missaguash River that forms the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Then you’d climb another ridge to where Fort Lawrence was, and another tourist information centre.  This was in the Amherst area where you could enter the town. (In the late 1980s, we often went to Amherst to rent videos.  There was also a Dairy Queen there.) But you could go further south to Truro, and from there south to Halifax or east to Cape Breton Island, which we regularly visited in the summer.

That was then, this is now.  I never learned to drive, but now I live in a big city near a streetcar line.  My household went carless ten years ago.  The Trans-Canada Highway doesn’t even reach Toronto!