Phyllis Brotherton

Ashes and File Cabinets*

In bed, in the early morning, my mind is roiling with the idea of an arc, a vantage point, a changing perspective. Much like as a child, when I lay on the ground facing the sky and, almost imperceptibly, experienced the earth move. At first, I thought the clouds were drifting by, but then I felt the movement in my body, in my back against the hard ground. I realized then that the earth was rotating beneath me. I embodied for the first time, though I knew it peripherally or learned it in school; that Planet Earth rotates on its axis, the very reason for sunrise and sunset. The sun not moving as you once thought and had always thought, but the earth and I am stuck to it, plastered against it by gravity. Only this pure science of gravitational pull held me in place. So that movement, that sudden realization, was a kind of arc; a line of perspective that I did not know before, but came to know and it altered me. The straight line of a life arcs a little, bends, and you are ever so slightly shaped differently, like the curvature of the earth. Thus is this arc of learning over a lifetime, sudden small realizations that continue to shape you.
 
 
*

Dorothy Parker died on June 7, 1967 of a heart attack at the age of 73. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation. Following King’s death, her
estate was passed on to the NAACP. Her executor, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O’Dwyer’s filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.
 
 
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I get out of bed to write about this arc of perspective, and over a first cup of tea read Rebecca Solnit’s end of 2013 post on tomdispatch.com, “The Arc of Justice and The Long Run.” She writes, “Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart, sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.” The synchronicity of these two facts: that Solnit mentions Martin Luther King, and that Dorothy Parker’s estate was bequeathed to the Martin Luther King Foundation is not lost on me. Does literally everything have a connection?
 
 
*

Philip Levine reads a poem by Ellen Bass in a podcast on Sound Cloud. Something about slaughtering Cornish hens as a part of a job she once had. Levine tells the host that he once commented to a student in night class, “You never write about what you do all day.” The student replied, “Who wants to talk shop?” Neither do I, and yet, file cabinets have filled my days for
over forty years. I have lived and continue to live among file cabinets.
 
 
*

I look up the word “synchronous” to assure my uncertain self that the word is properly used in this context and find a second alternative web definition: “(of a satellite or its orbit) making or denoting an orbit around the earth or another celestial body in which one revolution is completed in the period taken for the body to rotate about its axis.” I am suddenly that child on the ground again, in my Oklahoma backyard, with the feel of the earth rotating on its axis against my back. So far, I feel I am spinning in circles on some axis that is about to be revealed; an arc of understanding that is trying to take shape.
 
 
*

I spent the better part of a week in a dialogue with self and pretty much abandoned the idea of writing about ashes and file cabinets. It’s stupid, my inner voice drummed. The potential connections between ashes and file cabinets seemed remote at best. I had also become hyperaware that my mind circles around three main themes: 1) a son, 2) aging, and 3) death. I am striving to pry myself out of these three deep ruts.
 
 
*

And, I find that I am increasingly grumpy. If Joan Didion can be dark and grumpy in “Blue Nights,” and of course she had every reason, having lost a husband and a daughter, then I can. If Loren Eiseley can be curmudgeonly in “All the Strange Hours,” then I can. Voices change. Regardless of how we wrote or may have then written, the fact is, we are writing now and our voices have changed. So much loss factors in at some point in your life that you can, with little provocation, get grumpy. It is at this vantage point that eternal optimism pisses you off. Until, that is, it happily, sometimes for brief moments, it seeps back in.
 
 
*

A friend posts a photo of me on Facebook. I do not know that woman, whom she identifies as me, depicted in the photograph; I truly do not recognize her. The face I see in the mirror is not the face I see in the photo. Do we really lie to ourselves to that degree; believe that things have not changed all that much, when there has been a sea change? When did I become so vain? Joan and I both know that there is no faking it, that one gets pissed off at getting old.
 
 
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The thought of Dorothy Parker’s ashes languishing in a file cabinet now has me obsessed with the subject of the disposition of ashes. Once my attention turns to this, all manner of articles appear before me about ashes, even when I am not intently searching for them, as if the collective unconscious of all writers, or all the cremated individuals that have gone before, are handing me this information on a silver platter.
 
 
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Mental_floss.com lists ten amazing things your ashes can do after you die, as if they continue to do productive work. These include being encapsulated in an hourglass, made into a vinyl record, crafted into a diamond, stuffed into a teddy bear, mixed into the ink for a tattoo or the paint for a portrait, designed into pencils, used as bonding for stained glass shards or even made into fireworks. I think the latter interests me most. How exciting to think of becoming a huge pyrotechnic display, as one final pissed off act of defiance, full of electric blue and red explosions against the night sky.
 
 
*

My friend Bev’s ashes are still waiting to be spread. She always wanted her ashes to be mixed with wild flower seeds and spread in a Sierra mountain meadow. Because her son had stopped speaking to her, she asked her grandson, Jason, a cop in Sacramento, to scatter her ashes when she died. He had agreed, but my last email from him a few months ago said he hadn’t received her ashes from the crematorium and wasn’t sure if she had been cremated yet. I was in shock picturing Bev’s cold, blue body, or stark white, lying on a slab in a vault somewhere, waiting for someone to pay attention. I didn’t understand this. Too much time had passed. Why was he not checking on the status of her ashes? How long can it take to cremate a body? I could see that it might be really easy just to let this deed, a person’s last request, go undone. Is she in a beautiful urn waiting, or in a cardboard box to be retrieved?
 
 
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The productive work of ashes brings me back to Philip Levine’s comment on writing about what we do all day. What I have done all day for four decades could be boiled down to accounting for all manner of things, animate and inanimate, tangible and intangible: things like crude oil, crops, cattle, cat food, and crepes. Yes, I picked all “c” words. There are so many to choose from I could almost select any letter of the alphabet. In each case, I had many file cabinets around me, full of fat manila folders on a multitude of subjects, those that would have been pertinent at the time, like budgets, cash flows and projections of future potential outcomes. It occurs to me that for all those years, I have been either accounting for past results or projecting future results, which seems to me now to be uniquely aligned with the particular writing that I do, looking back or looking forward, which basically and noticeably leaves out today.
 
 
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CNN.com suggests ten bizarre places for cremation ashes: for example, they can be made into a comic book or held in a Pringles can. Edward Headrick, the inventor of the Frisbee, asked his children to mix his ashes into the plastic for a next batch of Frisbees. He thought it would be funny to end up on someone’s roof. Keith Richards snorted a line of his dad’s ashes mixed “with a little bit of blow.” And one of my favorites: you can be mixed into concrete and made into a permanent reef, providing a habitat for fish and other marine life for the current price of $3,995.
 
 
*

A friend Mary’s ashes were in a plastic bag in a rather large cardboard box. A cross-country running coach at Roosevelt, Mary had just made the seemingly sensible decision to buy a scooter to ride back and forth to school, but her partner, Dinah, was concerned. A few weeks later, a young man driving a green VW ran a red light at First Avenue and Sierra Street, broadsiding her as she pulled out in front of him. Her body slammed against his hood and windshield; then her head against the pavement as she landed. Through everyone’s grief, including mine, all I could think of was the young driver, just a boy really, and how this accident would unalterably change his life forever, much like an arc, a bending away from what once was. Carloads of her friends caravanned up to a favorite wooded glade close to Shaver, across a concrete bridge, next to a raging creek. We all sat on rocks or on the ground around the cardboard box that contained Mary’s ashes and chatted about our favorite memories of her. Then Dinah and their close friends began to fling Mary’s ashes to the wind. Some of the ashes invariably landed back on them, in their hair and clothes, into their eyes and faces. Adjusting their stance, they flung her into the sun, high above their heads, away from them.
 
 
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According to intenseexperiences.com, Disneyland is one of the most popular places for the spreading of cremated remains, especially the Haunted Mansion attraction, even though it is a misdemeanor to do so on private property. The practice is so prevalent the Disneyland custodial department purchased special equipment, vacuums with HEPA filters, to clean up the tiny ashes and small fragments of bone. If workers or performers notice a scattering, they’re supposed to call a special hotline and use the code, “HEPA cleanup.”
 
 
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I have spent the past six months, off and on, cleaning out file cabinets in my office at work, preparing for my approaching retirement. Several drawers are now empty. I am hanging onto a pile of old “Month at a Glance” calendars spanning the past fifteen years, a habit I started decades ago, when for some odd reason, usually a threatened or pending lawsuit, I needed to know where I had been on a particular date and at a specific time. For example, what day was it that I and a small group of co-workers had lunch at the Vintage Press with a board member whom we would eventually have to sue for breach of contract? In a prior job, I was asked in a deposition the details of another lunch, and I felt proud in being able to recall with particularity that the two subjects had each ordered the meatloaf.
 
 
*

My father is buried in a traditional grave outside the town of Atwood in Southeastern Oklahoma. The small cemetery is on a rise and if I stand next to my father’s rose-stone grave, I can almost see the farm and the dog pens where he collapsed one morning shoveling dog poop. My brother had just told him the day before that he was quitting the greyhound business they’d run together. A girl in South Dakota had broken my brother’s heart. He’s sixty-one now. His hair is silver grey and last year, he almost died of a heart attack. He miraculously survived, and still eats massive amounts of sushi and fried chicken, drinks the finest scotch whiskey and avoids exercise.
 
 
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A few years ago, PG&E emptied Shaver Lake to repair the dam. Unable to stop thinking about it, I drove to Shaver to observe something not likely to happen again in my lifetime. Emptied of millions of gallons of water, its artifacts and tan mud gleamed, and small ponds remained at the deepest parts. Signs said “No Trespassing.” I wanted to walk on it, defying police, the Gods and ancient tribes. I wanted to trespass right then on its moon-like surface, among the antiquities, rusty cans and exposed tree stumps, jutting out like jagged headstones. According to the tired and overworked forest ranger on duty, the dam would be lined with epoxy to prevent leaks, strong enough to last another eighty years. The small crowd that had gathered peppered him with questions: “Where did the water go? When will it return? How will it be refilled?” He answered from rain and snow, then snowmelt and runoff from the Sierras. He turned and whistled a shrill whistle at a couple who had already made it out to the center of the lakebed, mild outlaws now barred from ever returning. I was sad for Shaver Lake at that moment, seeing her muddy, soggy bottom exposed to the sun, to the cold night stars, its small intermittent ponds mirroring back the moon.
 
 
*

A few months before Bev died we had lunch in her room at a residential home in Roseville. I basically got her drunk, unintentionally. We munched on quiche and grapes, sipping on my homemade Kier Royales, her favorite. I’d searched Fresno for the currant liquor, knowing it would only take a few drops for each glass, and used her old style Waterford champagne glasses she had given to me when she was tossing, or ridding herself, of everything; when she had descended into, and never really came out of, her “I don’t give a shit anymore” phase. We toasted to good times. She giggled as the fine bubbles coursed through the veins of her ninety pound body and said, “This is fun.” Though she no longer had much use for food, she asked for a second piece of quiche. As I carried her paper plate to the kitchen microwave, I passed a lone old man in one of the living room recliners. He pointed to a clump of birthday balloons tied to the back of one of the kitchen chairs and said, “I have no idea what those are for.” On a day a few weeks later, Bev began to cough at that same kitchen table. As she got up and started with her walker towards her bedroom, her heart stopped.
 
 
*

Last April, I invited my son to a reading at school, something he had suggested over a Starbucks’ iced tea. As I drove away from Starbucks that day, I wondered if this would actually happen, that I would ask and he would accept. A few weeks before his birthday, I mustered up the courage and texted an invitation. He immediately replied, “Sure, see you there.” Neither of us cancelled, as we frequently did, and found ourselves actually sitting in the Alice Peters Auditorium for an MFA reading. I introduced him to professors and MFA colleagues who worked to suppress their surprise at finally seeing this estranged son I had written so much about. After the reading, hugging each other good bye, I took a bold next step and invited him to dinner for his birthday. His uncomfortable verbal dodges led me want to let him off the hook, “That’s OK, some other time.”
 
 
*

So what is the arc of perspective that I observe from this vantage point? What currently rocks my world as profoundly as my childhood epiphany that the earth rotated on its axis and around the sun? Alas, it comes to this: Dorothy Parker’s ashes in that file cabinet. This is not how I want this story to end. Not in a lament. Not in a file cabinet. Not on a library shelf at the Henry Madden Library. Not with words unspoken that need to be said. It is this arc, this sudden perception of circumstances seemingly unalterable, that I strive to unwind; that I know full well might be impossible to unwind.
 
 
 
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Phyllis Brotherton has had a career accounting for things. A late blooming writer, she is a third year MFA student in Creative Nonfiction at Fresno State University. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Spry, Your Impossible Voice, and is forthcoming in Under the Gum Tree. She works at the local PBS station and lives with her partner, Denise, in Clovis, CA.