pauses&clicks

I’ve been in my hometown this week, taking lots of pictures, many of them with this week’s photo challenge in mind, but with no real direction of where this post would end up.

I pretty sure it’s going to end up all over the place.

My mother would have been 92 this month and since I’m not often in the town she and Dad were laid to rest in, I visited their graves on her birthday.  They owned plots in a Catholic cemetery in Cincinnati for as long as I could remember and when we visited other family members there they would often point out the location of where they would be buried. Decades later, after one of her brother’s funerals, Mom decided she didn’t want to be put into the ground so my parents sold those plots and opted to be put into a mausoleum.

In some really odd way the ground shifted for me when they made that decision and at their funerals, nothing seemed right.  Instead of the traditional (at least in my mind) ceremony of the family gathering at the gravesite and the casket being lowered, we gathered in the cemetery chapel after their funeral masses for another service and then walked away. Somehow there was not the same finality.  At least not the finality I had always envisioned.

Apparently Mom’s point of view changed as she approached her own death and this was no longer acceptable.

But this was.

To my surprise I finally understood how Mom felt and my own personal point of view changed on this sort of mini pilgrimage.  I spent a fairly long time wandering around that cemetery on two different days and although it’s a well cared for establishment, many of the markers were overgrown and hard to find.  Not so with the mausoleum, which was easy to locate and well maintained.  Instead of looking down at a set of graves my eyes were drawn up to a single plaque with their names on it.  Light was all around them.

I was uplifted and filled with peace.

And now for a huge shift in direction.  Since we’re also talking about Dad may I add that he was a huge Cincinnati Red’s fan?  He was.  He instilled a love for the team in me, and the two of us then helped that along in my oldest son.  He grew up on military bases and has never lived in Cincinnati but he has always loved the team, so we came from different cities to attend a game this week at the Great American Ballpark.  I was still thinking about unusual points of view while I was there so this next photo essay is a more literal interpretation of this week’s photo challenge.

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I believe I felt just as close to Dad in that stadium as I felt to Mom at the mausoleum on her birthday.  It’s all about a point of view.