before i give you the end of the saga, i do have to back up here and wonder about the lack of toilet tissue. or wonder about me. were there no tissue boxes because Advent Bronze & Granite had run out--due to a recent high volume of grieving mothers and grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers? or were there no tissue boxes because no one ever cries when selecting a marker? or was the added distress about the ugliness of the markers enough to tip me over the edge, while other people don't find these markers ugly--so they stay in perfect control? am i just inappropriate here? oh, well. i confess. my waterworks have always worked well. i am a leaker, that's for sure. i always cried at the Budweiser clydesdales clomping through the snow. god knows now i'm a flippin' faucet.
so back to the marker. midst gearey and i telling Peachie (and a man who has joined us from the back room) that all the samples on the wall and in the book are what we don't want, we start looking for ways to describe what we do want. and i grab a small piece of not-bronze, a plaster square from the display with the sculpted face of the guy with the glasses (see Part 2--turns out his name was Simone Youseff) with a metallic looking finish. i'm pointing to the texture around the face, asking if we could have a nice subtle texture like it, but then gear points his brownish metal-look of his face and asks about that. can't we have that? just a nice NOT PAINTED metal finish?
Peachie and her partner look at each other, then at us, and explain that that is just "oxidation" which sounds much more natural to us than paint, and say that they will find out about whether the foundry can do that, because no one has ever asked them for oxidation before. which begs the question: why would you want not-bronze-looking-paint-over-bronze when you could have actual bronze-looking simply oxidized bronze?????
low and behold, the next day we get a nice rendering of a very tasteful, although pricier (oxidation adds to the bottom line) marker. of course, we haven't seen the real deal yet. and i'm still really skeptical that it will not disappoint me, making for even more tears. every time i visit Forest Lawn. for the rest of my life. and after my life when i'm lying under it. but i'm keeping my hopes up.
it'll be many weeks for the marker to be ready. but if it turns out well, you'll see it on the blog some day.
p.s. i'll link you to Advent Bronze& Granite. but just in case you think i'm nuts, picture all those metal-looking plaques this way: the shiny edges and the shiny lettering, etc., are polished real bronze. all the brown you see? all the green you see? that's really ugly paint and texturing. trust me.
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6 comments:
Wow! What an incredibly surreal thing to have to do. I can't even imagine what it must be like. how could any plaque, stone, bronze, PAINTED, granite, marble, whatever, depict the love you feel for your child. But to keep it so limited - maybe you can think that that is part of what keeps the site so pretty. I think that all of us need to focus on how pretty the view is from the site and how Kyle would appreciate that. He would have painted - REALLY - PAINTED the plaque anyway.
I love you Cyn - and Gearey if you ever read this. I still find myself driving to boston to work with my partner and just starting to cry . . . Kyle, Jonathan, my mom, my grandpa, my grandmom . . . and then I do the really un-yogi thing and think of the future . . .
enough of the morose.
I love you,
Di
Okay...I checked the link to the site....I would have needed meds.
robin, oh, good, you could see. and the photos are a real improvement on the actual markers!
di, oh dear! you're right. we'll need to tell the beautiful boys that we don't want any embellishments!!!
Did you want to look into the Fitzwilliam/granite/"think-outside-the-box" idea I mentioned, or is that just too complex/against the rules a concept?
And hey, Di - Kiersty, Nick and I are going to see you soon!
bronze only. 18x24 or 20x24. that's it. nothing else. no deviation. of course we do have a sunken vase on the grave. not everyone has done that!
more meds, please....
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