You Say Sequoia, We Say Pinkerton
You Say Sequoia, We Say Pinkerton
He Believed Her, And It Made Him Grow
November 15, 2018
Green And Gone And Growing
Pinkerton is asked about his funeral plans.
But I’m only 31, Pinkerton says. Why should I worry about such things?
Just because, he’s told. You never know.
Pinkerton walks away from this person and sits at a table at the other end of the room where several other partygoers are drinking and laughing and talking about things other than death.
He makes small talk, sips his drink and has a few laughs but keeps glancing back across the room at the person who wanted to talk about dying. The person is a woman in a purple dress. She’s pretty and silly and she keeps waving back at him every time he looks at her and she shouts:
“You’re gonna die someday, Pinkerton!”
No one else seems to hear her or even see her and Pinkerton wonders if he’s already dead and is overcome with sadness because Thanksgiving is just a week away and he adores yams and football. Then someone spills a drink in his lap and Pinkerton realizes he’s still alive.
After the party, Pinkerton cannot find the mysterious death-talking woman in purple and he walks through the cool November air to his apartment and waters his plant and then gets out his journal and writes that when he dies he wants to be buried in an open field with redwood saplings sprinkled all over him.
Pinkerton falls asleep, dreaming of women in purple and yams.
Then he dies.
56 years later.
He went on to meet the woman in purple again, her name is Doris, and they had a grand life together with children, yams, football, dogs, cats, sex, pasta and tremendous happiness.
Then when Pinkerton dies his survivors carry him to an open field, just as he wished, put him in a simple grave and sprinkle redwood saplings all over his body and pour dirt over his 87-year-old corpse.
His grave is adorned with a simple marker:
Here Lies Pinkerton. One Day May You Stand In His Shade.
The redwoods grow and grow, smashing through Pinkerton’s rotting bones and flesh reaching for the sky. Eventually the cluster of redwoods become a thousand feet tall and people come from all over to admire them, touch them, bask in their shade and laugh and eat yams and toss around the old football.
All this because Pinkerton, simple fella that he was, listened to that lady named Doris who wore purple and could see forever.
Doris, by the way, is still alive. She’s like 3,000 years old and still looks good in a dress. She thinks of Pinkerton a lot but never visits his grave because death, she tells anyone who will listen, terrifies her. --TK
Thursday, November 15, 2018