I wasn’t born yesterday.

I hear the collective sigh whenever I mention the perpetual plastic tub full of cemetery flowers that I haul around in my car, the motif changing with the seasons.

“She’s not going to mention all her dead relatives AGAIN, is she?” the plaintive glances indicate, my boss’s eyes wild and lolling backward in his head.

I didn’t raise my hand and volunteer for the job, but it’s been passed down to me through three generations of female grave-tenders, and I’m the last one left.

A connoisseur or plastic flowers and Styrofoam crosses, I can admit without hesitation that the cemetery culture and its freshly-lawned landscape have a way of sucking you into the vortex of past guilt. You know what I mean, like the time you snapped back at your sick mother and then before you could make amends she was dead, found at the kitchen table with a half-finished cup of morning coffee.

It was that kind of penitent flame, burning brightly atop some tiny altar near my psyche, that lead me to John, his widow’s directions to the gravestone written on the back of my hand.

I’d been taken aback during a Christmas past, when after John died she sent me a bundle of letters he and I had written each other back in the days when he called me “Babs” and I called him “Babs” for no apparent reason. At the time it seemed the more nonsensical we made life, the better.

Among the “Meet me at the Hayloft Bar on Greenfield” notes that were rescued from car windshields was a long diatribe I’d typed on single-spaced pages that ended with the line: “Do me one last favor – when you see me pretend you don’t know me.” Maybe it was that letter that lead John’s wife to think he and I had been romantically involved.

“Are you kidding me?” I blurted out, and refrained from telling her about the time we decided to kiss once, a long passionate kiss that ended with us swiping our mouths with the back of our hands while agreeing that we could only be together, if in the end, no one else wanted us.

John was a former boyfriend’s older brother and my best friend during a period in my life when all my friends were married and he lived, post-divorce, with his elderly parents. Perhaps our common bond was both of us wondering what I ever saw in his brother, who drove a broken down Chevy Nova, lived on Campbell’s cream of shrimp soup, and lacked social skills.

I can still see John clearly in his threadbare 34-inch inseam bellbottoms and Eric Clapton shag, tiny wire-rims perched on his nose. “Listen to this,” he’d say as his lead-in to the latest import album played at ear-shattering decibels. I can still hear how his voice sounded during all those late-night phone calls during which we watched television, he in his room, me in mine, laughing together at “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

On my desk at home is a black and white Poloroid of John doing dishes at a party in 1973, him looking over his shoulder at me into the camera. This was an hour or two before he called the fire department because he though the stove wouldn’t turn off. Somehow he failed to tell the other partygoers, who fled out windows and over the rooftop as flashing red lights pulled into the driveway.

I walked out of John’s life one night when I saw him shooting up heroin, and never spoke to him again until years later, on his wedding day, when he married a woman he’d met in recovery.

“I know you’re sad I’m not available anymore, just in case,” he whispered to me, holding me tight in his arms.

I wanted to tell him I was sorry that I wasn’t available to him all those years he struggled with addiction. As with all guilt, one can only wonder at the omnipotent “what if” and try not to let it be too “all powerful.”

I placed some plastic poinsettias on his grave this week, along with the "Guru Guru" album he bought for me one Christmas when our youth seemed immortal. His favorite song by the German rock band was "Immer Lustig," which means "Always Happy."

“Be ‘immer lustig’ Babs, and wherever you are, save a space for me."