:: glean ::

:: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 ::

Memorial People

They spend a day in the Botanical Gardens. The sky is blue. There are leaves, both falling and fallen. What Olivia notices though is all the memorial chairs. They are just normal park benches, but seemingly every one has been inlaid with a copper plate, etched with the name of a deceased person, their birth and death dates open and closed brackets below.

'What will they do if they run out of chairs?' she asks Andy. Andy doesn't want to respond, she can tell. He thinks it's one of her weird tangents that he tries to follow her down and gets lost. He's probably right, she thinks.
'The family pays for the chair,' he explains eventually. 'If they didn't, there would be no chair.'

'But when will it stop?' she asks. 'People keep dying, you know. And everyone loves a park. Who wouldn't want to have a chair with their name on it?' Even though, she thinks to herself, it does make you feel a little uncomfortable about sitting on them. Like they're permanently reserved.
'Eventually the park will be entirely benches. They'll have to cut down the trees to fit them in. ANd then you won't be able to walk around without stumbling over the memories of people, sitting and gazing.'

She can see that she's losing Andy, so she does her old trick of flipping things around, making it funny.
'Why should chairs be memorials for people anyway?' she says. 'How about people being memorials for chairs?' Andy grins. He likes this.
'Good idea,' he says. 'They could plaster little plaques onto their foreheads. In memory of a terrific bench down by the ocean. Sadly missed.'

:: Fretting 9:37 PM [+] ::
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