Memories are strange and funny things. Some are remembered while others fall away. I have a very early memory that has stayed with me for a long, long time - I must’ve been very young when this happened. My brothers weren’t yet born and I was in the car with my mom and dad. I was in the backseat and they were in the front with my dad driving. It was raining while we drove somewhere that I did not recognize. It was still raining when we pulled into a parking lot and parked the car. Nothing was said while my dad got out. I stayed in the car with my mom and we watched my dad through the front windshield walk slowly up the winding uphill path. I would discover years later that he was walking up through the cemetery grounds to visit his parent’s and grandparent’s graves.
I don’t remember anything else from that early memory. We drove home, but I don’t remember any of that. I just remember the first part. And it has stayed with me for all these years, and I’ve often wondered what my father was thinking when he got out of the car and walked up that hill.
So years later, as an adult, I told my dad that I really wanted him to take me to that place - and he agreed. That place was the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery. My dad hated driving on the beltway with all of the traffic, especially the trucks. So rather than taking the highway we went through town, and took all these city streets and back roads. This is was what we came to call a “SchwartzCut”, because it was clearly the slowest way you could get from point A to point B. But you never had to deal with the highway traffic.
So we arrived at the cemetery, got out and he and I both walked slowly up that winding uphill path. But it was not a rainy day. It was a sunny day, and when we got to the very top, which was the edge of the cemetery, I saw before me the gravestones of my grandfather and my grandmother as well as my great grandfather and great grandmother. The inscriptions were both in English as well as what appeared to be Hebrew, although I was not able to read that.
My grandfather, who I’m named for, died at the very young age of 42, due to a hospital stay complication. It was never clear exactly what happened - only that my dad had to be brought from the Maryland school for the Deaf in Frederick, MD, to the hospital, experiencing at the age of fourteen, the loss of his father. But for me, all those years later, to be looking at a gravestone and seeing my name etched there was a feeling I still can’t even describe.
My dad and I stayed for a while, put stones on top of the gravestones, because that’s what was done as seen on all of the surrounding stones. And then my dad and I drove home. After that I went back to that cemetery several times over the next few years. Most memorable was the time I visited almost at dusk. When I got to the top of the hill, there was a fox alongside the fence, very calm, just looking at me, before wandering slowly away along the fence row and disappearing into the nearby woods.
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