alone

I was seventeen and living in Fort Smith, AR for a few months in the Spring of the year. It was a time of transition in more ways than one. Bereft of home and purpose the only thing holding me together was a job as a dishwasher in a drive-in "Mom and Pop" and laborer in a discount home improvement warehouse. I would consider myself at this time something of a vessel lacking content but ripe with potential. I still hadn't read a book on my own for pleasure. Ozzy, Nirvana, and Steve Miller were about the limits of my musical library and I only had an Iron Maiden poster but not a single tape of theirs. I was struggling to pass high school having lost all interest in rute memorization and the desire to play social games. Life hadn't started for me yet, at least not that I was conscious of at the time.

The seismograph scratching away on the scale of my life recorded not an earthquake but an implosion one partly cloudy day as I walked the town roads headed towards the city for work.
I really enjoyed walking and did it quite often even though I owned a baby blue 1968 VW bug. In Arkansas the burbs are not really what one would consider "burbs" having only a Wal-mart and some "mom and pop" stores strung down twisty roads in between grazing meadows and drainage ditches. The expanses between each point of interest was greater than a small kid could wander and what would now require the average lazy American a car to traverse.
Walking along I left behind the town roads for the three lane highway and began the slow ascent up the small hill and around a long bend on that stretch of asphalt. Up ahead was the old, white building seemingly growing out of the top of the hill at the apex of the bend. A large field lay opposite the warehouse and had not a fence, a sign, or any signal that it was anything other then a field with a small dirt track breaking off the highway and running twenty feet into the field. I only realized there was a dirt track because for the last half a mile I was trying to walk on the concrete curb "tight rope" style and this little track broke my winning streak. So I stepped down onto the road and began to walk to the continuation of curb when something in the field caught my eye; a break in the browns of wild wheat and the greens of grass.
I decided to walk up the track to explore. As I approached the dull, flat grey spot my eyes couldn't quite grasp what they witnessed there in the ground. Trying to understand how that object could be there, like a monolith in the middle of a primate encampment, it wasn't until I turned my head and noticed another, and another that I began to understand somewhat where I stood.
It was the most plain and generic of all tombstones my eyes had ever seen. Nine in all. Two merely read the date of death and "Unknown".
Shocked and confused as to why these things were here I couldn't think of what to do, or even what to think about it all. Should I run and tell someone? Build a sign at the side of the road? Was this a long, lost graveyard?
I was without an idea as to how this could have come to pass. My mouth must have hung open for a good length of time since it had become dry.
Finally, I left the field and crossed the highway to a gas station just a little ways back from whatever it was I has just rediscovered. I bought a Mr.Pibb and a Zero bar in hopes that these two comfort treats would bring me back down to Earth and inside my body. I walked to the counter so the old man at the register could ring me up and mentioned what I had found to see what he thought or knew about it.
He remarked that it was the city's charity graveyard, a place for all those bodies to go when there was no one to pay for burial or an unknown body was found. In fact, a few years ago he watched the truck drive up and three guys got out, dug, and laid to rest the body of an old man found in an abandon truck at the edge of some woods not but a few miles from where we stood now.
I walked out the store and looked back towards the field and thought how strange and sad it was that such a thing existed. I couldn't process all of that information that day and went on to finish my walk munching and drinking, trying not to think about anything at all. Emptying my vessel.

A decade passes...

Just the other day this memory came to me in its entirety and I became deeply troubled and moved by the memory. How each one of these people were buried without fan fare. Without a caring escort. That at the end of their lives they were already forgotten. No families called their names out. No institutions claimed their membership. No buddies missed them at their card tables. They had died as alone as their final years must have been.
No money. No heritage.

nothing.
nothing.

For two of them, not even recognition of who they were on this mortal coil.
I wept for the thought of these souls buried on the side of a highway in a field North of Fort Smith, AR. They will never be remembered by name. Not even by me; I hadn't wrote a single one down.

One day I will go back there and sit with them and talk. It is too late for me to comfort them as humans and give them what we all want...attention and love. But I can do it for the memory of their souls.

Today, I am happy because at this moment in time I am thought of and loved.
I don't have all the things I need and I have even less of what I want, but I am alive on Earth and I can still talk and be with you all.
The next time I think I'm alone, that no one understands me, I will remember those nine rock placards and thank all the powers that be I can at least drive to a Walgreens and talk to a teenager behind the counter.
Still make a difference.
Maybe visit a nursing home.
Take toys to a boys or girls home or an orphanage.