Church Picnics at Doughton Park: The Persistence of Memory

 

 When I was young, my church went to Doughton Park for a picnic every October. I had no idea where we were once we got there. I never drove, so in my memory, it has always been this nebulous, unreachable place. I wasn't even aware it was on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I think I’ve been afraid to look for it. Maybe I felt like I no longer deserved to find it. I’ve spent decades puzzling over where this place might be when it was so close, if I had just been brave enough to look.

Today I found the spot of those church picnics:  all those hours of food, communion, peace, love, and acceptance. Was that not real? How did we lose all of that? Was it a ruse based on the facade of conformity the whole time?  Looking over the empty tables, haunted for me by so many ghosts, I had to make myself stop searching for and grieving all those people who once meant so much to me and who are now lost to me.

So I parked there and walked through the fields I used to run through as only a child can, over cow patties (that at least hasn't changed), to the rocks that awed me both then and now, and as I walked, I thought, if I wanted to reconvene these people who once meant so much to me, how would I do that? And I knew that the only answer was that I would have to die, and then some of those left living might come to my funeral, if they didn’t have some other more pressing engagement that day.

And I realized again what I’ve known now for a long time: We don’t do living right.