Picnic for The Ones Left Behind

Picnic for the ones left behind is despite its name a festivity, unsomber, casual. It’s immediate family only, meaning not those bound only by marriage and blood but those made family in kindness and who have made it this far in the same rough caravan or assemblage; that’s strict. We meet at an oceanside campground high above the sea, at night. Stars, of course. The dry white grasses blow back and forth looking ghostly and the roses and the poison oak are shining; there’s a moon at sea, besides which and a few humble lanterns everything is dark. The wind plays at the hems of the tablecloths. The mood is before but before what is unclear, not before a certain time because the picnic doesn’t belong to time anyway, not before an event exactly because what could that be, the sunrise, a falling star? But before is palpable, we all feel it without having to say it. Our midnight dinner is pork sandwiches, cole slaw, corn, on wooden chargers that weight the flying cloths. We mutter and chat, unhurried by time, and far below the light of the moon and the skin of the ocean slide across each other in opposite directions, a caress. By one of the picnic’s greatest generosities no one is clouded by memory or forgetting: each bears the face he wears in your heart. Far below, miles it seems, the black, wave-washed rocks are home to a traveling carnival, lit up weird and veined in the dark. There’s a big top, an orchestra, a ferris wheel. Other than the music drifting slowly up the human noises from below are indistinguishable, lost in the surf—the carnival obviously like the living world—bright, noisy, planar. But that’s all for later. Up here in the cradle of the world we have something else, it’s a place we live.