Have you held that thought about Queequeg's coffin? This chapter was written before many of the preceding chapters, because in life, as in Moby Dick, we know the end, and we are sailing somewhere in the days between.

     In the celebrations of the Day of the Dead, the shrine of mementos and tributes is called an Ofrenda: offerings to the spirits of beings who have gone before us.




     My sister Joan died in 2016. She was 77. She died of the same lung cancer that had taken my father, and our mother's mother. Joan had smoked cigarettes from her early twenties, but had quit in her late 30's. Four decades later it caught up with her, unexpectedly, and she was gone in a matter of months. This cache of papers that were given to me on her passing: a handwritten account of Grandpa Oliver's early years, my sister's short narrative imagining their meeting back in 1899, their love letters when separated, a typewritten autobiography by Grandma Oliver, and the handwritten script for my grandfather's lecture on the Human Mind.



     These are the writings of my Grandfather and Grandmother, which I edited into short book. Reverend O. The reverend died a few years before I was born. I am named after him. He was a Methodist preacher who met my grandmother Dora Lulu in a dusty copper-mining town in Arizona. They were married in 1902. Later he was a pastor to various congregations in Southern California.





     Among my possessions is a rubber stamp for the marking of the reverend's books: "From the Library of John Oliver", and this gold watch he was presented for driving all the bars out of the town of Santa Paula.



     The bible was given to me by Grandma Oliver, Christmas 1948. I have dim recollections at her ivy covered house in Whittier. She died in 1957, I was 13 years old by then and my memories of her were from rare visits to the rest home provided by the Church. She was always sitting in her chair. Her voice had an amazing sonorous quality filled with gravitas and confident authority. As if her words were accompanied by a grand pipe organ.

     My father, Wesley Hamilton Oliver, a thoroughly kind man, had his best years when we kids were young and he could devote himself to showing us the world. He died when he was 78 from the effects of his lifelong tobacco use. Among his belongings, I only wanted these round gold-rimmed glasses he wore the whole time I was growing up.



     My mother lived to be 100 years old. There were lots of things to be distributed after she died. Just like the symbolism of my dad's glasses, I saved this worn tablespoon to remind me of her. In my nostalgic vision she's stirring chocolate chip cookie dough in a heavy ceramic bowl with the glazing chipped in the bottom. When we kids were growing up, that was the best years for both of them.

     On the mantle of our home in Petaluma, there's this large urn. It contains the ashes of Carol's mother Sally and the founder, in a way, of this house, since she provided the inheritance that enabled Carol to buy it.



     In 1999, our dear friend Dick Latvala passed away and to turn my grief into some kind of homage, I began creating an urn from a piece of that sinker log redwood I saved from the Vine Hill project. Sinker logs are from the days when huge redwood trees were plentiful on the Northern California coast. Enormous logjams of cut trees were floated down the rivers to the ocean. The massive weight of these churning logs drove some of them into the bottom to get stuck there, where they remained for 100 years or more. This particular log came from Mendocino's Big River. Divers with scuba tanks go down and attach chains to the sunken logs, attached in turn to heavy inflatable bladders that when inflated, lift the sinkers from the bottom. That much time underwater makes some radical changes in the chemistry of the tannin's red color. The milled lumber from them appears dark and streaked with purple.

  

     So that's the piece of sinker log I had left over. The urn is a simple box with a sliding lid and interior dimensions of a size that would just fit the 15 Dick's Picks CD's that had been sum of his releases at that time. The base is larger than the sides so that it could be held upside down for the scattering of ashes, which was done a few months later near Angel Island. It sat in the middle of the Ofrenda at Dick's Memorial in the Phoenix Theater. It was heartbreaking to know that my friend was in that box.

     In 2013, my cohort and buddy Andrew Gordon passed away. Again in my grief, I created an urn for his ashes. This time I used curly grained redwood. It was the perfect choice, because the wood was the very same color of his hair, his wife's hair, and their two daughters', and all curly as well. Again, his urnful of ashes were taken to his memorial and toasted by all present. And once again, our hearts were breaking for our friend in a box.

  

     Finally, next to the urn with Carol's mom's ashes is this small ceramic box. It's a masterpiece, created by Damian Strahl for Dick. It's quite ingeniously adorned on its sides with storm clouds, some with a lightening bolts. On the top, a skeletal figure is opening this very same box. Any Deadhead would say this is obviously a Box of Rain, and it contains a small remaining portion of the ashes of Dick Latvala. He is somehow with us in our living room. Still, I wonder where he went.

  

Nothing for sale here. Uncle John's Garage Sale was the name of the book.

     

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