"Bring tea for the Tillerman
Steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come"
The grand encampment of Barker and Ogden kith and kin over the 4th of July weekend at Windrock involved so many friends and relations one needed a scorecard to keep track of them all. Fortunately, my cousin John's wife Megan used her graphic design skills to collect and display two family trees with names dates and thumbnail photographs for practically everyone in 5 generations from my maternal great grandparents on down to a baby on the way. Several of us provided the genealogical data and tracked down needed images, but the end result allowed us all to puzzle out such things as who went with whom and what a 2nd cousin once removed looks like.
I took fewer photographs of the festivities than I had intended, or rather I focused on recording certain stages while actively participating in others. I have no pictures of the extraordinary drip castles on the unexpected sand bar revealed by an unusually low tide, nor the swarms of children who helped to construct them or dig quahogs rooted out by searching toes. I did not get pictures of the intergenerational baseball and soccer games that sprang up on the lawn. I had many conversations with wonderful people, and so have no regrets on that score.
"Seagulls sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin, the children play"
There were some things that defied photography, like the phosphorescence that made the still waters glow for midnight swimmers, and the fireworks that erupted up and down the shore on both sides of the bay and behind Great Neck.
No one, I believe, wanted any pictures of the most dramatic and terrifying event of the weekend, when the Angle of Death dipped so near we could feel the beating of its wings. My cousin Colin broke out in hives and soon went into anaphylactic shock in the water where quick heads, sound 
medical knowledge and other people's EpiPens kept him alive until the EMTs arrived. My cousins John and Margaret happened to be with Colin when he collapsed and pulled him to shore, and they were outwardly shaking (as were we all inwardly) for hours afterward. In our number there were an EMT, a doctor, and the head ER nurse at the local hospital (who as it happens is also Colin's mother). My cousin Jay and my cousin Leila's husband Pete the EMT together had three EpiPens and it took two of these to have any effect. But for them and the grace of God, we would have suffered a terrible tragedy. The next morning when Colin walked toward us like Lazarus with his family as we laid my grandmother's remains in Earth, he was greeted with shining eyes and a round of spontaneous applause. There was even more joy and thanksgiving in the church that Saturday from this largely secular family as we celebrated my Grandmother's life and our personal Passover.
"Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day"
There are three stones where my grandparents remains reside. One of these is the veteran's stone that acknowledges Grandpop's service in the Pacific during WWII. There is now another paired with it that lists Gran's full name and the Hebrew word "Mizpah", with which she used to close many a letter to loved ones away from home. It may be translated:
"May the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another."
The third stone comes from Windrock itself and is newly etched with her first and maiden names and years of birth and death. It says Barker on another of its faces, and on the top are two words - "Gone Fishing" - which are less irreverent than they seem. My Uncle Rob, when a young boy, learned about the water table in school and decided that when people are buried they could go fishing there. This so tickled my grandfather that he said he would like those words on his tombstone, and this was remembered many decades later and dutifully done.
Those two inscriptions are fitting bookends for these two extraordinary lives, the earthy and the ethereal, and are streams that run deep in all of our veins.
"Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day"
- Cat Stevens
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