Often times over the last 50 years the skies were shrouded in clouds and other times the stars shone brightly at 519 West Fayette Street in Baltimore, Maryland when one of the more unique events in grave veneration would occur on Jan. 19. Sometimes the weather was nice and other times it was dark and dreary.
All the while once a year a man clad in black walked past the graves of the first mayor of Baltimore, past the grave of Francis Scott Key’s son and straight to the grave of poet Edgar Allen Poe.
The “Poe Toaster” as he became known always left a half-drunk bottle of fine French cognac and three roses. He came and left secretly, and to this day no one knows his name or why he came.
2009 marked his last appearance as he hasn’t come the last two years on Poe’s birthday, Jan. 19.
I am no scholar of Poe though I have read the Raven, the Tell-Tale Heart and one or two other titles that escape me now but the apparent ending of this tradition is what has me blogging.
Four imposters showed up. Maybe they were looking for fame, maybe they were just trying to take up the mantle for the man who no longer came, who knows. I think, however, that it is best Poe Fans, to let this tradition go if in fact the original man or his appointed successors have stopped.
People have gathered for years to silently observe the mysterious man and his ritual without interfering, and I think that’s a better tradition. Go ahead and keep the vigil, even though it’s unlikely the true toaster will ever return.
Those of you who know me know that I often have grand ideas that never go anywhere. Maybe it’s life getting in the way and maybe I’m just a big talker, I don’t know. What I do know is that I am unlikely to ever do anything so great as to have my future grave venerated in such a way.
I’ve never been obsessed with death or dying but the idea of a final earthly resting place has always been important to me and here’s why.
They say none of us are immortal, which is true personally. I will die, you will die etc. However, what I perceive you to be continues to exist even after you die and that is the same with how you perceive me.
My grandpa, Bill Weber, died recently, but the man I knew is still in my memory. In that small way, he still exists, even if only in a subjective non-corporeal way.
So long as we’re remembered, we never really die. Joe Schmo who worked as a farmer in Georgia and lived from 1824 to 1885 and had no wife or kids is truly dead.
But Edgar Allen Poe, who billions know of and about, is not. He not only wrote things of note but after he died, people could say, “I can’t show you his life or what he did but here is where it ended.”
A grave marker is like proof to future generations that whoever lies beneath is not an intellectual abstraction but was in fact a person who lived and died just as they will. It makes them real. I hope one day when I tell my kids about my grandparents that when they’re older they’ll come with me to the grave sites at least once.
And when I’m gone, whether I’ve done anything of note or not, I hope my grandkids will extend the same courtesy to me and bring their children or so that I can be real to them in some way.
Call me sentimental or delusional or whatever, but I think that’s a cool thing to do.
You can visit a place where ashes were scattered or visit the coordinates where a body was buried at sea but there is nothing there to make it real. It’s just another story about a dead person. At a burial site however, one can make the physical connection.
For the record, I’d prefer Maker’s Mark whiskey to cognac, but roses are just fine.
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