My 200th Post... Well, Actually my 201st!

Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, I have reached my 200th post. The experience of having you all read my thoughts day in and day out has been very much appreciated. All of your comments have meant so much to me.

When I compare the number of posts I have written to the number of posts in many of your blogs, 200 seems quite a low number and yet, to me, it represents a large part of my life over the last couple of yours. My posts are more like memoirs to me. Down the road, I want to be able to go back and read about what was going though my mind during those years of my life. I want my children and grandchildren to one day read their father’s and grandfather’s thoughts as he travelled through life and maybe learn just a little bit more of who I was and what I appreciated most about life.

In celebration of my 200th, I was going to make up a list of 200 things which I wanted to do before I die but when I got to number three, I all of a sudden realized that I wasn’t going to make much past three… well maybe if I stretched my mind a little further I might have reached ten but not much more. It was then I decided that, instead, I would repost what I consider to be my favourite post. It it such a favorite post of mine because the individual spoken about in this post represents what I would consider to be true love and dedication towards family in a world where many consider family secondary to things such as the success of the rat race in which we live. Now I know that four or five of you had already read it but since I enjoyed it so much, I can only hope that you might enjoy it once more as well. It is called “The Peanut Man” and it was originally posted on January 8th, 2007.

To all my blogging friends… Thanks for your friendship, thanks for your thoughts… I guess just plain thanks for everything!

The Peanut Man

Last August I visited my grandmother’s grave site at our local cemetery. During this visit, I noticed an elderly gentleman in his seventies walking across the cemetery with a bag of peanuts in his hand. By the strength of his gait, I could see that he was not merely wandering through but instead heading to a specific location. On the way, he would pick up fallen flowers arrangements and respectively place them back on their rightful headstones.

He finally stopped by a headstone that hid in between two cedar bushes. As he paused, he started up a conversation to what appeared to me to be with no one in particular. After a few minutes of observing this, what I incorrectly thought to be, “bizarre behaviour,” I finally realized that he was actually speaking to whoever was buried beneath this particular headstone. I didn’t have any idea as to who he was visiting but I was sure that whoever it was he must have been very close to.

Shortly after this brief conversation, he walked over to an old oak tree and proceeded to throw peanuts to the local grey squirrels. After this kind gesture, he turned around and headed back to his car. I got the feeling that feeding the squirrels was something that the person he was visiting used to do throughout their life and it only seemed like the right thing for him to do now that they were gone.

About a month later, I returned to the cemetery only to once again find this gentleman walking across the cemetery with a bag of peanuts in his hand. It was as if I was in a state of déjà vu. After the conversation at the gravesite, he again fed the squirrels and then promptly left as before. Up to date, I have seen this gentleman six times and each time, he follows the same routine.

Often, when a relative of ours departs this earth, we attend a funeral in their honour and return to our homes after the interment. For some of us, we may visit on a weekly basis, others annually while others never. I suppose that our visiting frequency of the grave site would depend on the relationship that we had with the person now deceased. Regarding this gentleman that I observed, it would appear to me that he was extremely close to the individual he was regularly visiting. I cannot help but assume that he felt some sort of comfort in conversing with this deceased individual.

Yesterday, while taking some photographs for another headstone blog that I was working on, I observed this gentleman yet again silently in conversation with whoever he felt such an attachment to. I would have loved to approach him and ask him as to whom he visited every week but fearing that I would be invading his privacy, I chose to silently observe off at a distance. After he left, I approached the grave site that he so religiously attended to get a better idea of who he had been visiting. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was probably his parents who were there resting in peace.

I can only imagine how much this seventy plus year old gentleman loved them and how much he missed them. If each of us could love our friends and family in life just a fraction as much as he loved them in death, our homes would be a much happier place to live and our lives so much richer. When I think back on all the times I witnessed this gentleman, the word that most often comes to me is "precious." How precious can one's love be for another!

Just after I snapped this photograph, I watched him as he kissed two fingers on his right hand and then lightly touch the headstone. If I was close enough, I am sure that his parting words to the ones he loved so much would be...

"Goodbye Mom and Dad, I will see you next week.”