Allhallowtide

After a seemingly unremitting siege of grief and death in these pandemic years, we enter the season of the Día de los Muertos (Oct 31-November 2) and the Christian Allhallowtide, (Halloween, the feast of All Saints, and the feast of All Souls). This moment in "the thin place," during which, in Celtic lore, heaven and earth come closest, feels both fraught and more evident than ever.
 
This year I raise up the memory of two women who were part of my childhood, even if neither was much part of my life when I grew up. Both died this past year.

I find I have childhood pictures of them both.

Her dress here was a Halloween costume, though I think it would be fair to say she delighted in the image she'd assumed. Marjorie Putnam Adams was the only one of my first cousins who was within ten years of my age; all the others were at least 10 years older, pre-WWII babies. The family expected that we should bond. I think we both tried, but each of us found the other incomprehensible and perhaps not much fun.

Marjorie devoted her later life to promoting our great grandfather, Doc Adams, for induction into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame as "One of the True Fathers of Baseball." The New York Times ran a lovely obituary account of that as yet incomplete quest.

• • •

Martha "Marchy" Zietlow Bowden was my closest friend until about age 13. She lived across the street. We shared a nearly insatiable appetite for playing catch with softballs which we threw over the 50 foot high branches of elm trees in the middle of our residential street. Our parents complained that we were going to be run over by cars -- and this was not entirely unreasonable -- but there was no stopping us of a summer evening. We'd go on until we could no longer see.

We attended different elementary schools, but later the same high school. And there we drifted apart. Occasionally we exchanged Christmas cards, but I've never been good at that custom.

She died last week in Beverly, Mass. Here's a sweet obituary.

• • •

The eighteenth century preacher and hymn lyricist Issac Watts' paraphrase of Psalm 90 comes to mind:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
soon bears us all away. ...

When it is one's age peers departing this life in perfectly normal circumstances, it's hard not to contemplate mortality. And why not? We will all go. Think how much more of a clogged mess the planet would be if all the humans ever born hung around, taking up space and resources forever ...