Off the World

Overnight an old day has come into town. The day is grey and it is how it should be, or so I am being told by the flower merchants who sell these seasonal flowers usually found on moors torn by wind shafts and that I seem to be the only one to find beautiful at my window.

Strangely this should be a good day, the day of the recognised good people, whom we should all know the virtues of. Yet no-one speaks of saints today, unless you are spreading your wings to St Peter in Rome. Today nobody cares of the good known people, but of the bad, unknown, normal people and we enjoy spending time remembering their sins in this world, that, supposedly, should disallow them access to this good old sky we are being told is our aim in life. You get it: it is All Saints day, and we are going on pilgrimage to the tombs, or wherever we think the tombs are for those we loved.

I do not like going to the tombs – for the tombs are more for the souvenirs of fun late afternoons eating crisps, lots of crisps, all these crisps we were not allowed my brother and I in normal times, and that my mum’s cousins were overfeeding their kids with. It was fun also because it was the beginning of winter and we were often, just before, which fortunate for good presence, according to my Gran, going for some new cloths shopping. As the first of November usually sounds the beginning of the first winter colds, it was also useful; we were not freezing out while playing in tombs’ fields. In fact, it was a odd day, where we were all voluntarily late, just because…. It is not fun to listen to a priest telling you that your family is gone, and to hope for the final, always coming too late for your childish lack of patience, enunciating of your family name. As we are not an ‘A’ family, it is not a short time we had to wait. It was even worse after our names: why do we have to wait and listen to everybody’s name, and not go to the tomb, our tomb, quicker? Was that a conspiracy to make us all believe that death attends us all

With my grandmother, we usually went to this old village, full of sinners, and now repopulated by recoiled bourgeois who work in town. It was a full day of festivities: the pleasure of going to the plastic flower shops to get some of these plastic flowers, beautiful in my eight years old eyes, ugly and despicable in the eyes of my Dad and my Mum, who saw in these a sign that my grandmother refused to grow to a world that would always be too new for her. My gran never had a television. She always stayed living in a world of radio where merchants come to your door every week, one with a few eggs and some milk, another with some meat, one with her medications for the week…., merchants whom she would welcome grateful every week for she still thought they held the clues to the scary modern world there outside.

1 de Noviembre 2007