One Long-Stemmed Rose

As I come back to this blog each evening, I come back with memories. And sometimes, like tonight, memories in memories.

For a couple of summers in the early 1970's, I worked as a playground supervisor for the Madison Township Recreation Commission at Southwood Schools in Old Bridge, New Jersey. They were memorable summers, maybe more memorable than I would ever had wanted them to be. Many of these memories were good and productive. Some were not. In short, the job for which I was hired, running a summer program for local children from six to twelve, was almost secondary to the job I adopted for myself, trying to take teens off the street and into productive activity. I found myself running a softball league to try to steer a number of teenage boys, some of them pretty troubled, toward a more positive life and out of trouble. I look back on these two summers with satisfaction. And with sadness. On balance, I was successful; and, as a result, they were successful as well. However, for some of those boys, this attention to their needs came a little two late. Over those years, alcohol, and auto accident after auto accident, took a few of them at far too young an age. I considered myself a failure for not being able to "save" them all, and visited their graves a number of times over the next few years. I was a young man in my twenties. I am now a "mature" man in my sixties, and I look at these events in a very different way. Not that I am not sad at their deaths, but happy that the majority of them lived, and many prospered.

On August 15, 2006, I had a reunion with two of them. It was a reunion that was long overdue. We met at Southwood School and fell into remembrance almost immediately. As we walked around the grounds of the school, they spoke of problems that they could never have shared with me when they, and I, were younger. I choose not to mention their names to safeguard their privacy, but one is now a teacher with a masters degree, and the other a grandfather. We rode around the housing development, remembering who lived at this house, and who at that. Then, we went to Holy Cross Cemetery on Cranbury Road in East Brunswick where those who could not be with us on that day were buried. I had bought a dozen long-stemmed roses to lay on the graves. We paid our respects to those we lost, and then we went to lunch at the Olive Garden.

It was many years ago, but I could see on their faces and in their manner, that they had not forgotten. And, like me, still were in contact with the sadness of what had happened those two summers so many years ago. For me, however, I felt that loss but also gain, for I had them. I was proud of them, and all of the other young men that left that softball field to create for themselves successful lives. I wrote the following poem as a reminder. As if we could forget.

One Long-Stemmed Rose
Christopher Bogart

There’s an uneasy stillness in this place,
Where those we loved,
We have left in peace
To sleep
Beneath the ground
Of our overwhelming helplessness at their departure.

Our grief lies like a pall along the grass strips
Between the stones
That seem to gather
‘Round our feet.

We roam its close-cut lawns
To read past the names of shades we’ve never met,
In our attempt to find the few
We felt we really knew,
To stand before them and
To wonder
How we can find them now.

Are they at peace below this soil,
Wrapped in this manicured lawn
So carefully cut?
Do we not wonder if the pain
We feel at their loss
They feel at theirs?
What life is here
Where life has ceased to be?

We walk to them to bear one long stem rose,
Wrapped in clear plastic,
Transparent protection from their thorns.
Our pain is borne among those thorns
As we try to make some sense
Of senseless death.

They once lived their lives
Along the greening path,
So strewn with those same thorns
Whose sharpened tips in life
Drew blood,
Drew pain,
In vain attempts
To find love,
To find care
In a world that never seemed
To care enough.

We lay our only offering,
One long-stemmed rose,
One each upon their graves,
In memory of the thorn-strewn path
They had to clasp
To find at last one bloom
They can call home.