A decade or so ago I discovered those enchanting things, the flash mobs: spontaneous (to onlookers) break-outs of music in public squares. Wonder is near the very top of sublime human emotions and the flash mobs were wondrous surprises when and where people least expected them. I saw a flash mob surprise birthday party. I thought of throwing one for my enchanted son. But surprise birthday parties are tired, transparent affairs that drain the surprise. A random day, not a birthday, I thought.
My daughter makes fashion videos and a recurring theme is to indulge for one day or one night your fantasies through dress. It’s Cinderella and it’s doable and can be pulled off. So Dion’s fashion vids reinforced the enchantment of—“For once in your life…”
As I got deeper into the autumn of my life people I knew were dying and there were the de rigueur funeral “celebrations of life” which were anything but celebratory and then the dearly departed was planted or cremated and forgotten by all but their closest relations. The vast, vast majority of us die uncelebrated in anonymity. For the desired effect on the honoree the flash mob celebration should not be on the deathbed but while (s)he is fully sentient and healthy.
I came to think that I wanted a flash mob. I fantasized about it. I fantasized about being my curmudgeonly self in my everyday wear, tee shirt and boxers on some random day and hearing music and voices down in my building’s parking lot; rising in curmudgeonly irritation at the racket and opening my door to see wth was going on. There they were, all of my few friends current and from decades long gone and forgotten serenading and celebrating me for no reason other than I was me. It would happen and then they would disappear. It would be a transcendent experience that I would remember for the rest of my life.
And I got it. I got it when I least suspected it, at a funeral that I attended January 10th through 14th. People, family members, I hadn’t seen in 30, 40, or 50 years, who I scarcely knew, others who I had never known, greeted me with unbounded love, love that I never expected, love that was exquisitely genuine and startling in its emotion. The poignant, longing “Ahh’s” of my Big Brother when I arrived, his tight, never-let-go hugs, our just-us-two outings, the “stay right next to me” during the services for his wife of sixty years--It was surreal, uncomfortable to the sensibilities of others a couple of times, but in overwhelming whole the greatest outpouring of needed, wanted, poignantly cloying, unconditional love that I have ever received in my life. And I received it from the man who has been the longest important person in my life, and from three of his children.
A funeral is an irreplicable event, I have written about that trip. So is a flash mob celebration I got the flash mob celebration of me simply for who I was. It will never be replicated, could not be replicated and I had it, “Once in my life.”
Good night pageviewers. I love you.
