Fitzgerald's Grave

It's a short walk uphill and south from the Rockville Metro Station, in a peaceful church cemetery that rises above Rockville Pike. Fitzgerald's grave. I got dropped off by second cousins after an early Thanksgiving celebration with my great uncle in Rockville Center with some time before the next. I called my mom. Rockville was deserted. A few cars in front of the Multiplex Movie Theater, the sky gray, overcast, balmy for late November. I crossed the Pike with the flashing Walk sign and began climbing the rise to the church yard. "Have you ever seen The Omen... you know, with Gregory Peck," I asked my mom. I found the gate in the fence next to the front entrance of the old church, let myself in. I walked out to the point, the statue of Mary rising above overgrown Arbor Vitae, and then back toward the church steeple. We were still talking when I came upon it. I set my bottle of Chateauneuf Du Pape down on the top of a headstone. "I found it," I told my mom.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The Great Gatsby. Across the marble tomb. I read it aloud to her. He was forty-four. This was a good year for me to come. Being stuck a writer, he rowed on at writing, and what endurance, what perseverance it must have taken. Against a current, a tide, yes, indeed. A writer, constantly coming to terms with life, experience, the past, with all that claims the mind.

From a headstone one gets a sense of the bravery life takes. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The name suggests the Irish need (embracing America as they did) for the community that art, music, tales of living, the joys poetic prose itself brings, the bravery to keep on doing that when it is no longer rational or a good idea, as long as it is the truth. What can you do. "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy," he said. He kept with him that burning desire for discovery, studying something carefully enough to be able to, if one had to, write about it, on through to the end.

A gravestone set lets you know that this person, these bones below, was real as you and I, just as full of grounded juice. You never know what to expect within, from yourself, when you stand before a grave.

The leaves are scattered about, the grass wet, windblown, verdant beneath them. Pennies placed carefully and orderly on top of the headstone, some heads up, some tails up according to some plan of homage and Abraham Lincoln's touch, holding in the wind, some withered bouquets of flowers, browned, like those pressed in books, still wrapped in wet plastic, one bunch having fallen from the tomb, a votive candle half filled with rain water above the pink red wax. Some empty tea candles in little glass cups, the ring of a bottle on the dark green marble (from Connemara?). Each gesture meaning something, from passers by who've gone out of their way out of a devotion. The gifts do not say why exactly they have been left. Just that "I have been here, to pay my respects, even though I did not know the man."

For a moment, surveying the scene, a stand of old trees darkened by an earlier rain, the cemetery yard ringed by an old black steel picket-railed fence, you felt the tucks and rolls of the land extending out into the periphery back before the shiny glass office building was placed just so, before the vast parking garage and high-rise office building down the hill were built. You found a sense of what it was like being the first human being laying eyes on primeval land. Gentler, the churchyard's touch upon its surroundings, a retirement community's seven story building rising at a safe distance from it. You get a whiff, in between the modern, a peek at the lay of the land as it rolls and extends away from Rockville, the Potomac pouring unseen in the wooded distance over Great Falls. Farmland, horse country. The steep-rising strong brick Federal farm houses of the Civil War era that dot here to Gettysburg, down to Richmond and beyond.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Fitzgerald, prone to alcoholism, was beset with an armada of emotions, as Hamlet before him, and out of them he spun a magic and also a wisdom that pertains to this day.

After I walked around the little church, St. Mary's, the oldest Catholic church in Rockville. There is the new church, built in the Sixties, looking exactly as you'd expect it. A two-story dorm for the nuns, completely quiet, not a light on, a few icicle decorations on the inside of windows before black curtains. I came upon two rabbits, one male, one female, wandering and grazing in the green grass at the edge of little walkway. They kept calm, sensing the odd protection of a sanctuary, contrasted with further surroundings, a glimpse of the metro train's lit windows sliding past heading south just beyond the old red brick train station with eaves overhanging to protect the forgotten activity of comings and goings. No nuns to be seen. The parking lot, small, a sign for "Clergy Only," and "Priest."

As I walked away, texting, a man came up the Pike's sidewalk. "Can you help me out so I can get a goose?" He was carrying a soft clear plastic zippered case of pillows and sheets, it looked like, holding it to his chest. He stood and stared at me. Sure, man. I pulled out a few singles I had on hand for the Metro, handed them over to him. He said thanks blankly, indifferently, and I walked on, coming back to the present time.