At Least They're Committed

I pick up the spoon by its maroon and white ribbon. It is wedged in the passenger-side door pocket of our Ford Freestar amid old receipts and a clear plastic bag. The ribbon is tied neatly and somehow permanently glued to the silver handle along with three, squarish white beads with the letters “P, A, T” etched in black. The tip is covered with dust that I wipe away.

From the driver’s seat, D glances over.

“A memento from the funeral?” I ask. He’s been back five days now. “A spoon? Why?”

“To scoop out his ashes,” D says flatly. “We all got some. I need to put him in my guitar case.”

“Oh,” Hmmmm. I look at my fingers where I’d wiped the dust from the spoon, then back at the door pocket at the clear plastic bag. I lift it. “This is Pat?” It was, or is, or at least about three tablespoons of him.

“Yeah,” D’s voice is still flat, kind of somber and resigned. “I don’t know how I forgot.”

Pat, who died Nov. 1 of diabetes complications while watching college football, has been riding around in the minivan for almost a week. I squeeze the ashes through the plastic. “There’s bone in here.”

“Huh, really. I never looked,” is all D says and a song we both like comes on and D drifts into his thoughts, most likely of upcoming CU-Oklahoma State matchup or maybe dead friends or some such thing. I think of running into GDA last night; how he asked why I’d changed the interrogation blog.

“You altered your answers,” GDA had said. “Can I ask why?”

“The person who needed the answers already saw them and it seemed safer,” I had replied, honestly.

“That’s what I thought,” GDA had said. “I liked the first answers better, though.”

“Yeah, me too.”

But now Pat’s sitting in my lap and I’m staring at him and the song’s over and I’m back from my thoughts though D is still deep in his (football . . . fooooooootball, heh).

“So you’re going to keep him in your guitar case?”

D crawls out from inside his brain. “Yeah, he always was into that. He was always saying ‘bring your guitar.’ He always wanted to play and me to play. He was like that,” he says.

“We should get him a better container,” I’m holding Pat up to the light now. Yup, those really are bone shards.

“Oh, yeah,” D agrees. Seventeen seconds of silence.

“Maybe the metal flask I got you in Vegas?” I’m brilliant. They went on a guy trip to Vegas at Pat’s insistence a couple years back. They hope to do so again soon in his honor. Pat loved to drink . . . I’d gotten the flask for D at the New Media Expo at Vegas in August because I didn’t feel safe bringing a bottle of Barry Manilow wine home in my suitcase even though it would have been funny.

D agrees. “Yeah,” he nods, contemplating. “Yeah!”

Six seconds of silence, then D adds, “As long as we can keep the boys from trying to drink out of it.”

Good point.