Because my daughter loved cemeteries when she was small we went to Druid Ridge Cemetery, a few blocks from our house, as often as we went to the nearest park. Druid Ridge was shadier in summer, had more paved paths for biking, and had an endless variety of gravestones to discuss. I kept a tote bag by the door with sheets of white paper and two fat, triangular crayons for making rubbings of gravestones that caught our fancy. We visited our favorites again and again: The Pinkerton family plot marker shaped like a window frame. The marble column topped with a sundial that announced, wistfully, a bit corny: I count none but sunny hours. To my daughter gravestones were not grave but interestingly varied and varyingly climbable: something to find pictures on, peek through, or trace with a finger. The names we sounded out made a strange map of sounds, words but not words.
A name is a word and not a word. Like a word, it is a sequence of letters and a sequence of sounds. Grave markers record names; names engraved in granite slabs or raised on metal plaques attempt to tether the intangible person-ness of a person to the most persistent materials of the material world. The name placed on the stone is an incantation to keep the dead awake in memory. A name recorded but unused is not dead but sleeping.
The poem “Macleay Road and Druid Ridge Cemetery,” from my book Her Names, Her Wits, explores relationships between name, self, and memory. This poem attempts to map the space between name and person–between Virgil Elizabeth Myers engraved on a gravestone in a cemetery and the things I mean when I say your Grandma Virgil, who you’re named for: an old recipe card for sour cream fudge with one, if you hide it well enough written on the “Serves:” line; a grey-haired woman gesturing stone-faced at a million sucres fanned out in front of her on her hotel bed in Quito; raspberry canes left behind in a summer garden, still seven feet tall and fruiting six months on from her death, rustling in the summer breeze: take, eat, these are my berries, grown for you.
I don’t remember ever going to a cemetery with my grandmother.
A name is a word, but also not a word. We gave my grandmother’s name to my daughter. At some point during my many trips to the cemetery with my daughter, I started collecting names that were also words into little verses that we would chant as we walked. As I composed I sometimes erroneously chose names that “weren’t words” to fold into my poems—sometimes this seemed like the flip side of saying a word so many times it’s wordness becomes strange, unbelievable: a non-word suddenly seeming like it must mean something. More often, it was because they were street names I recognized from the neighborhoods where I walked with the baby and ran with the dogs, sounds we pronounced that meant: the spot where a fox crossed the street right in front of your bicycle! The corner where the good taco truck is parked! Where you turn to go down to the playground!
A name that’s not in use is sleeping. When I met my husband the house he had just bought was in a neighborhood called Ralston. The signs at the streets where you came in declared it one of the oldest established neighborhoods in Pikesville. The qualified grandiosity of this claim is one of the oldest established jokes in our relationship. In Druid Ridge you can find the name Ralston on a few gravestones. Is one of the people buried there the Ralston? One gravestone documents three deaths, on the left:
WIFE
CARRYE F. RALSTON
SEPT. 5 1888
NOV. 29, 1967
And then on the right:
HUSBAND
DAVID A. RALSTON
JUNE 4, 1877
JAN. 16 1963
THOMAS H. RALSTON JR.
APRIL 6, 1870
OCTOBER 1, 1961
The only map I have here is a triangle of names, and they raise a lot of maybes and answer none. Maybe they lived in the neighborhood that shares their name. Maybe people stood on the porch of the very house where I’m writing these words with the name Ralston and the tang of gossip on their tongues, and maybe when they said it they meant that old widow who married her brother-in-law the minute her husband was in the ground. No one in the neighborhood is talking about her anymore. A name that’s not in use is sleeping. My favorite maybe goes maybe all three of them loved each other very dearly. When I say Ralston to a child sleeping in the car at the end of a long trip, what I mean is: wake up, we’re almost home.
A name is a word but not a word. Some words are names and some names are words. When you’re alive your name means you; sometimes it means the you you mean to yourself; more often the you you are to each person who knows you well enough to use it. If it’s a word, it also means what it means as a word in the mouths of people who don’t know you, and also sometimes in the mouths of people who do know you. When you’re dead your name means you until the people who used it are all gone and then it means pure sound (if your name was not a word), or it goes back to meaning what the word means (if your name was also a word). If your name is given to a place, your name will mean the oldest established neighborhood in Pikesville to people who don’t even know if David Ralston and Thomas Ralston were brothers or cousins.
A name has a flavor when you say it, and the same name on a different tongue has a different flavor. If it tastes like the last raspberries left on the canes, it might be my grandmother’s name, which is also my daughter’s name. It might be an incantation to preserve haunting. A grave rubbing uses hands and wax to transfer language from stone to paper. You can say the words or silently take them home. A person’s name, carved on a stone, is not dead, but sleeping; say it and see what wakes up.
