A few months ago, C. and I discovered in downtown Brno a delicious Indian restaurant called Taj (which here is pronounced like ‘Thai’). After giving up on both of Brno’s Mexican restaurants, because of inauthenticity in one case and ridiculously-priced inauthenticity in the other, we needed to find somewhere to go for special occasions. Taj is just that: You can get a beautiful spicy meal there, but a dinner for two’ll cost you 600 crowns (about $30, which is two-and-a-half days’ pay). Thus we leave it for very special occasions, like our third anniversary, which we celebrated in April. Recently, however, we have discovered that Taj has an excellent and affordable lunch special, so we head over there once a week to see what's on offer.

Today we decided to have lunch there, and we walked past St. James Cathedral on our way from the tram to the restaurant. We finally saw with our own eyes the archaeological dig we’ve been hearing about. Apparently, while tearing up the street next to the church to perform some sewer maintenance or some such, city workers stumbled upon an old cemetery from the middle ages. It makes perfect sense, because every other church is surrounded by its own proprietary cemetery, but St. James is surrounded on four sides by city streets. So the real question is, at what point did the city forget about the existence of the cemetery and just pave over it? In any event, regardless of who forgot what when, there have been human bones resting just under the pavement in the middle of Brno for a couple of hundred years, and a bunch of folks are now busy excavating them. Today, the green-overalls city worker guys were sharing their turf with a bunch of student archaeologists, who were gently dusting off the just-exposed skeletons, some with crushed skulls, some fully intact and still in the reverent burial pose. I'm not sure I'd ever seen real human bones before coming to Europe, but I know I've seen a lot of them since. We have the Capuchin Monastery crypts, the bone church in Kutna Hora, the holy relics built into the cathedral in Olomouc, and so on.

I mentioned the green overalls guys because they entertain me so much. Not the guys in particular, because really they're not very entertaining at all, but their colored overalls are. From what I can tell, this is just a European thing. Different trades wear different characteristic colors, though it could very well be that different city departments wear different characteristic colors. In the Czech Republic, there are a couple of shades: green, navy blue, red, maybe some others. I remember the German overalls palette, though, with much respect. Not only did they choose vibrant colors to liven up their workaday jobs (collectors of the recycled glass in fuchsia overalls, rakers of the leaves in sea green, baggers of the leaves in emerald green, sweepers of the streets in orange, and so on around the color wheel), but they wore them with such pride. "I am a member of the orange team," you could practically hear the man thinking to himself as he scrupulously arranged the piles of dirt at the curb for another orange-overalled man to pick up. "We possess skills and efficiency that men in other-colored overalls will never understand."

I'm trying really hard to tie these themes together, but I give up. It's going to have to go like this: Death does not wear vibrant colors. Death wears saltpeter slacks (chimneysweep chinos?). There's something very humbling about seeing all these skeletons, the remains of people who died hundreds of years ago, whose great-grand-children died just slightly less than hundreds of years ago. It's not just that these people receded over time from the memories of their descendents, as almost everyone does within a generation or two. Even though digital photography and modern data storage technology allow us to archive every detail of our lives as they happen, the great-grand-somethings who we will never meet will eventually forget that we ever existed. Eventually, everyone in the city of Brno forgot that the people who had once been worn by those bones had ever lived at all, and they simply paved them over. Above the skeletons of the monks in one room of the Capuchin Crypt, plaques read, "What you are, we were. What we are, you will be." It was meant, perhaps, to be a cryptic rallying call for the afterlife, but it points more directly to the perseverence of dust.

This makes some sense of the tombstone habit, wherein we engrave our names and appropriate dates for all to see, anchor ourselves to a given time and place ("Hey, that guy was alive during the Civil War!"), for the sake of not being wholly forgotten, at least until the wind and the stone come to an agreement about who can last longer. It's strange to realize that my parents, for instance, exist now only as memories of my first-hand experience. When I am gone, they will exist as stories that I have told about my memories, and then they will become stories of stories that my grandson thinks he remembers hearing from his grandpa when he was a kid, though he might have seen it on TV, he can't quite remember. This is how we disappear.

first, i think our friend mr. sedaris had a little something to say about "discovering" restaurants that are listed in the phone book. ahem.

i wore green overalls when i was pregnant. they cut generously for the fecund/beer belly. and my butcher's jacket is still in frequent rotation. we must go shopping before you leave and get you some working man clothes. i think your "man with a brick" idea could be expanding slightly, perhaps with a skull in the other hand, for next halloween.