Tag: Fredericton

The Grave Marker Maker

Where I came from, country people had a wry and realistic view of death. They had to. As farmers and stock keepers, the cycle of birth and death was up close and personal in their every day lives.

Roast chicken for dinner? No supermarket down the street where it was easy to pick up a roast chicken – cooked or uncooked. The hungry farmer sought out the poorest layer in the flock and headed to the butcher block. Off with its head.

I came from a small and mostly rural Canadian province. Stories about birth and death were awash in myth and mystery. And, occasionally, ridiculousness.

As a television reporter in the 80s, me and my cameraman were assigned to investigate a tiny graveyard nearly an hour’s drive outside the booming metropolis of Fredericton (population: 44, 000+).

CBC TV had been invited by a local historian to investigate a smattering of bespoke headstones in a small local cemetery. We were met at the cemetery’s entrance by a local woman who looked clearly discomfited at the arrival of nosey city folk.

What we saw at first glance was a field of small, boxy headstones, mostly lopsided and irregular in shape. Upon closer inspection, we saw that someone had carefully spelled out the name and birthday and date of death of each deceased person. In twigs.

It was evident the maker wanted to remember the deceased and grant them the dignity of a grave marker. In a spirit of love and generosity, he – I am assuming it was a he – had made over three dozen headstones, each painstakingly crafted by hand.

He had laid out the names and vital statistics in twigs in a wooden box and then poured concrete into them. Alder was the wood he used, I imagine, as it was plentiful and its’ young branches were long, thin and pliable. Two problems: the grave marker maker was a dreadful speller and had little sense of proportion.

The twigs didn’t cooperate very much with his aesthetic efforts by staying fully in place. What should have been straight lines were a little wavy. When the deceased’s name was too long, the grave marker maker simply rounded the corner of the box and finished up the name down the side.

The end result looked a little less than professional. More like the work of an earnest kindergartner to be accurate. Grave markers to be sure that were filled with misspelled and misshapen names and dates. Lots of them.

We didn’t do a story that day. I sensed that while the historian had a professional distance from the comical stones, the local who took us to them was clearly uncomfortable. There is a fine line between poking fun at someone who is in on the joke and someone who has inadvertently attracted ridicule.

Years later, I heard all of the stones had been replaced by more staid and suitable granite headstones. With the names spelled right and lines as straight as arrows.

Still, it is poignant to think of the hours invested by some earnest and well-meaning member of the community to properly remember his kith and kin. We pick where we choose to invest our labor on this earth.

It is sweet and a little sad to think that, in spite of the odd and disastrous products he produced, this chap felt he was doing sacred homage with his labors.

Then and now, I felt a little sad that his work did not survive. It is said that it is the effort we should praise and not the outcome. I can’t help thinking that the poor man’s efforts might have lasted a little longer on this earth than they did. And remembered with kindness, not ridicule.

150 Years Ago

I often wonder what our ancestors would think if they miraculously came to life and wandered into our modern life. Culture shock in extremis, most likely.

How we fill our days is motivated by need. We all have to keep body and soul together. How we do that is 180 degrees away from the ways our ancestors worked and lived.

My people on both sides were working class and mostly rural. Some made it to the “big city” to find work. But when the population of your “city” is a fraction of 1873 New Brunswick Canada’s entire population which was made up of 35,000 souls, well … that’s tiny.

My great-grandfather Lemuel Parker Brower was a machinist. His job was taking care of the town clock in Fredericton’s City Hall. See it up top there in the picture below. Lemuel Brower was taking care of it daily around 150 years ago. The clock functions pretty much the same way today as it did back then.

Lemuel and his wife Julia had twelve children together. They were not French Catholic where large families were the norm. But they both came from the countryside and Lemuel was of Dutch descent. The Dutch farmers had passels of kids to help run the farms. As did many other European descendants.

Later I saw the apartment building in Fredericton where Lemuel and Julia raised those twelve kids. Think of a modern two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than that. The urgency to launch those kids into their own lives once they were of age was not only an economic but a space imperative.

Their eldest – my grandfather Orlo Lemuel – found work in the Hartt Boot and Shoe factory. He worked there all of his life until he finally retired well into old age. That option has also changed dramatically in our modern era.

People hopscotch from job to job today like kids in a schoolyard playing the old hop, skip, and jump game. The idea of loyalty to a company and vice versa is a long-dead value that went the way of the dodo bird with the introduction of the microchip. Where steady, meticulous, quality work was the agreed-upon social standard for work products in days gone by, now it is speed and profit.

I am reminded of Bill Gates’ strategy when he started Microsoft. Gazillions of buggy Microsoft Office products were released and sold worldwide deliberately for sound business reasons. Create a dependence on “our” product and get to the market first. We’ll fix any problems later.

And so it is the norm now that we see version after version and upgrade after upgrade of our commonly-used tech products and software. iPhone is on Version 14. I swear Version 13 came out six months ago. Whether the changes are significant enough to justify the cost of upgrading is an individual choice.

Often the changes are as insignificant as a few more pixels in the phone’s camera or a marginal increase in the size of the screen. I’ll stick with my trusty old iPhone 11 until it no longer serves the functions I use it for.

Need expands to fill the space allotted. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 little kids in a two-bedroom apartment in the “big city,” they made it work. Astonishingly.

In rural New Brunswick, Canada, where small family farms were the norm, it took some time for the notion of smaller families to take hold. It would take the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and World War One and the Great Depression to alter society significantly enough to pare down the expectation of how many kids a family should have.

I think of my grandparents Lemuel and Julia often. They made do and raised a solid family who went on to do solid working-class work for most of their lives. Their lives were not flashy nor vital in the grand scheme of things but they were important: to their community and to their family.

One hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t a single piece of bling amongst their possessions nor had a single article been written that mentioned their existence. Until now.