Ashes and Airports

Glad to see you. Not that I’m not enjoying my flight delays, but it’s good to have company.

Truthfully, it’s not all that bad. Think about it: when else in western culture are people required to do nothing but just …be? It’s like enforced Buddhism.

While not being enlightened enough to find my personal Nirvana at gate 18, I did find a decent glass of scotch and some wicked good onion rings.

Why am I here? This trip, this blog, and the onion ring+scotch queesiness all have their genesis in death.

(“Notice how the author juxtaposes beginnings and endings…” Great word, juxtaposes. Makes you sound like you know something. In grad school the makes-you-sound-like-you-know-something word was “modality.” You always had to sprinkle a few modalities bacon bits on your papers to ensure a good grade.)

My uncle, Ford LeMay, died suddenly this year. We had just talked on the phone a couple of days before then I get a voice mail from the coroner’s office in Charleston asking if a know a Hanford LeMay. Bam. I really loved my Uncle. Not that he wasn’t totally a character, but everybody needs a crazy uncle. And my uncle was the kind you could tell anything to and you knew he wouldn’t tell mom, or try to lecture you, or tell you what to do. He just listened and loved you.

I was 17 when he showed me what New York City was all about. Not the traditional see the Statue of Liberty tour, mind you, but a gay man’s guide to cool places. We had dinner in Greenwich Village and I remember commenting that the waiter was really cute. Without missing a beat, he raised an eyebrow in a comical leer and said yes he is. Then we both cracked up. Nothing like hitting on the same guy as your uncle. He loved to set propriety on its ear, yet also was the perfect New England gentleman. He had a large family of friends who loved him dearly in Charleston where he later lived.

A month before he died, we talked about final wishes and he said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the middle of Provincetown, Massachussetts. “Isn’t that illegal, in a public place?” I asked. He said that as he would be dead it would bother him much. So I am headed to Commercial Street, so that Uncle Ford can have one final act of living (er ,dying) exactly as he wanted, propriety be damned.