You know how it is when your memory holds an image that your vision can't spot?

I mean, my mind's eye told me exactly where my father's grave is.

Yet, I wandered through the small churchyard for fifteen minutes - as long as my three-year-old would permit - and I did not find it.

As it's been some time, I made allowances for the many additions. No doubt. Twenty years' worth of additions. I found death dates in the late 80's and early 90's, and told myself, "You're getting warmer."

I choked up at the Calla family plot. There is still something wrong with that. No less over the numerous infants, a day old, two weeks old, two months old.

I can claim that Christopher's impatience dragged me from there but, to be honest, it was heartbreak at the thought of those infants, fifty or seventy or one hundred years ago, that drove me out. Who still remembers, or feels the pain of their brief existence? Only churchyard visitors now?

How about this row of Caddys laid upon grandpa's headstone. What devotion.

It was during a social function for my in-laws at the fire hall which butts up against St. Cecilia's cemetery that I caught my eldest son, then about three, standing and staring out a back door, in the direction of the cemetery. I asked him what he was looking at and he said he saw a man right there, right there, looking at him. I saw no one. I don't think he meant his own reflection.