28: Walking, Dead
If you ever find yourself with a few hours to kill in Atlanta, here’s what I’d tell you. First, honestly, if I was in a certain kind of mood (pedantic, hangry), I might say something about how the phrase “killing time” is a scourge, time doesn’t need to die, time is precious, time must be coddled, if anything, because hours kill themselves with ruthless efficiency all on their own. But then I’d apologize and get on with what I meant to say, which is: You should go to Oakland.
You should especially go to Oakland if it’s spring or if it’s fall, but any month will do, and any sort of halfway decent weather. You should go by yourself, or with one or two friends. Maybe one of you should stop and pick up some pastries and coffee from Little Tart across the street, then you can all meet at the big gate on Memorial Drive. There are tours, docent-led and self-guided, and you can take those if you want. But really you can just wander.
What will you see? Old graves and old brick paths and old trees. New graves and new sidewalks and sometimes a film crew, sometimes a funeral, sometimes a wedding. In mid-April, the place is exploding with irises; in the absence of proper names, you may identify them as the big purple ones, the little purple ones, the little yellow ones, the big russet ones with the golden stripes, all of them alien vulvas, all of them who knows how old, who knows how many springs they’ve heaved themselves out of the ground and onto their own graves.
Lots of mayors are buried at Oakland, and Margaret Mitchell and Bobby Jones and Kenny Rogers for some reason. Lots of Confederate soldiers, their rows of headstones like so many grinning mouths of rotten teeth. Lots of Black people and poor white people with no headstones at all. Three tight-packed Jewish burial grounds, hidden feet all pointing east. The lion is gone. “The Goat Man” finally got a marker after 106 years. Stone lambs mark the graves of children, except the one that marks the grave of a pet mockingbird. Real mockingbirds pick fights in the hedges.
You can bring your dog, if you don’t mind that lightly cursed feeling that tends to linger after your dog pees and dumps on various dead people. Or you can just sit on a bench or a low wall and watch the other peoples’ dogs, and the chipmunks, and the baby bunny, and the hawk perching on the obelisk.
If you go with a friend at some point you will probably start talking about something that’s wrong with your life or theirs. You will get all wrapped up in each others’ petty grievances, as friends do. You will forget everything except the way in which one of you and therefore both of you have been wronged by the universe. You will be trusting your feet to navigate the tricky old paths and at some point they will fail you, and you’ll trip, and you’ll look up, mid-lament, and you will see a carved statue of a robed figure standing between to columns holding up a slab that says YOUNG, and the robed figure will have no head but somehow it will be staring at you in judgment, and you will find yourself laughing and unable to remember what exactly was so bad before.