He hadn’t visited his parents’ graves since his mother had passed away fifteen years ago, his father had died eighteen years ago, both on July 15. Strange. But then, he thought, they were a strange couple.

Traffic on the highway was heavy until he got away from the city. It felt good to be on the road again, he spent too much time in the city and had always loved driving. He didn’t own a car, he had rented this one, a nice blue Pontiac...Sunbird or Sunfire or Sun-something or other, he loved driving but never paid much attention to the makes of the cars. The graves were in a town about two hours from the city, so it was a nice drive for him. It was May and he had the driver’s and passenger’s front windows both down and his arm resting on the door feeling the warm spring air; a beautiful sunny day.

The tires hummed, the steering wheel felt nice and fat under his hand and the car pretty much drove itself. He had forgotten to bring any CDs and wasn’t much of a radio listener. He started to think about his parents, they were a study in opposites. His father had been a professional engineer, very quiet, very intellectual (was that a dirty word these days, he asked no one in particular). His mother, on the other hand, had grown up on a farm out west and was a bit on the loud side and never read anything but TV Guide and Reader’s Digest. They say that opposites attract, maybe they do at first, but based on what he saw, this didn’t last as the years went by. His parents had always argued and sniped at each other with sarcastic comments, they never fought loudly, it was like a guerrilla war with sudden ambushes and sudden, inexplicable truces. The weapons were words and the weapons were the kids, him and his sisters. Most of the time, the fighting was done with words, but if one of his parents wanted to really make a point, the kids were dragged into it; it was like he and his sisters were human IEDs in the guerrilla war, he smiled at the thought.

He had actually come up with the wording on his father’s gravestone, something about his dad being a gentle, thoughtful man. This was true, but his marriage had turned him into a fighter and he gave as good as he got.

He didn’t know what was on his mother’s side of the shared marker; he hadn’t had any contact with his sisters since the funeral all those years ago. I’m sure they put something nice on it, he thought to himself as he passed a truck. “Here lies an unknown housewife” or “She nagged herself to death” or “Edith threatens to leave Archie - tonight at 9”. Nah. They wouldn’t put that on the marker, it would be something trite and stale. Whatever, he’d find out soon enough.

He hadn’t been close to either of his parents and didn’t really miss them at all. His father had been a dedicated company man and was married to his work, his mother had smothered him and when they were both gone he had felt a feeling of freedom. A sense that now it was his turn to live!

After his father had retired, like most men of his generation who had no hobbies and lived for their job, he was utterly and completely lost. The man in the gray flannel suit, forever! He tried to keep up genealogy, a hobby that he had happily managed to turn into a job. It got him out of the house and away from the low level conflict that was starting to heat up after his retirement. The kids were all living away from home by then so the house was a free fire zone.

The highway turned into the quiet intersection of the town where the graveyard was and he pulled out his map, consulted it for a moment and then swung right, into town. He drove through town and out past a bridge over a small river, past a military base and past houses that, as he watched them pass, seemed to have guerrilla wars going on in them right now. People are people.

He found the cemetery, turned in on the gravel road, got out to open the gate and then drove down to where he remembered the graves had been, it had been a long time! He stopped the car, turned off the motor and walked down a ways, past the long departed and the not so long departed.

He found his parents’ grave. His mother had been cremated and buried with her father, perhaps to nag him in the next life. The inscription was on his father’s grave, as he now remembered it, but the side of the granite slab for his mother simply gave her name and year of birth and year of death, nothing else. His sisters had left it blank. They couldn’t think of anything to say either. Maybe they were as tired of the whole thing as he was. He stood for a minute, then turned on his heel and started back to the car. The gravestone beside his parents’ marker caught his eye. It was a very beautiful stone, he wasn’t sure what it was, black marble maybe. On it was a man’s name, the two years, one marking his entry, the other marking his exit and then, larger than anything else, was the logo for BMO, the goddamn Bank of Montreal! Next to the logo it just said “40 years”. There was nothing else on the marker! He stopped dead in his tracks, looked at this headstone, looked back at his father’s epitaph and laughed all the way back to the car.