Random Page - Gravedigger's Thots; A Good Job

...returned because his wife wanted to be back among her kin. He said he "came back to die." Being a gravedigger perhaps had made him preoccupied with death - he commented when he showed us the newly-dug grave that that was how & where we would all end. He offered us a drink of his iced tea which we declined. It was thru him we learned that once a church had stood, red brick & sturdy, where the small park now was but he said, young people around there no longer go to church so it'd no longer been needed & had been torn down tho he himself wondered why they had not slavaged the good, deep well there had been in the basement. We waved goodbye to him as he sat, resting, on a gravestone.

(At another roadside I sat at a picnic table & absorbed & swallowed & drank in the space, quiet & solitude of the Iowan spring countryside, drunk with it, while Doug drove the car around the turn-a-round. He drove around & backed up & around the other direction & back again. He did well, I was relaxed & didn't even turn around to watch. As I took over to head on home I told him he'd done well. In a few minutes he asked how he'd done and I said kindly I'd already told him what a good job he'd done and he said, "I know. I guess I just like to hear it said.")