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The Dead and Beautiful Rest (Cont.): Platypus Travels Part LXII

Things are made to endure in the Shire, passing from one generation to the next.  There has always been a Baggins at Bag End and there always will be.
This is a memorial plaque dedicated to the Bulkley Family.  It stands in the same cemetery as the graves of Lewis, Minerva, and Nancy Shelton and Annie J. Hinman.  The Bulkleys and the Sheltons intertwined at numerous points of their respective family trees and the name "Nancy Shelton" recurs several times (though none of them are Lewis and Minerva's daughter).  The plaque is an testimony to the aristocracy or "old bloods" of New England.  These are the sorts of lineages that mics like my family and other new arrivals were measured against.  This is what it means to have "roots" in the community.  What can drifters like us throw in the balance against almost 400 years on this side of the Atlantic and another 800 on the other side?  We may be descended from Brian Boru, but isn't every Irish-American these days?  Before monuments like this, we melt away as smoke.  We are flowers of the field: by evening we are gone and our place remembers us no more.

He who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God, he will never leave it.  

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