"A word after a word after a word is power" - Margaret Atwood

BRIDGET WHELAN

A blog for readers and writers

A blog about the stories we tell each other and how we tell them...

Saturday 22 January 2011

A Small Stone Number 21

Taking a short cut through a small cemetery, where it always seems to be autumn, I noticed for the first time a weathered headstone to a grandfather called Fred Friend. The alliteration, a furry blur on the tongue, encourages smiling and I think I would have liked this man whose family knew that he wouldn't have wanted the formality of Frederick.

4 comments:

martine said...

am also a wanderer of graveyards
thanks for sharing
martine

Anonymous said...

Nice! :)

BRIDGET said...

Thanks Sahera

BRIDGET said...

Hi Martine
There is something fascinating about graveyards, isn't there? It is hard to walk through without imagining the stories buried there. On the same day in the same place, among all the 'dearly departed' and 'beloved' headstones, was one dedicated to 'a peaceful father' who died just before Wall Street crashed and the world went sad and crazy.
Why peaceful I wonder: was life so stressful for the bereaved family, so rocked by changed, that his calm presence was a steadying influence, a shelter in a storm? Or was the adjective a bit of gloss, the family reinventing a father who never said anything or did anything, just was...