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GRAVEYARD MEANDERIN’; OR, THINGS OF LIFE LEARNED AMONG THE DEAD by Leslie LaRo  I have never been a particularly “normal” person, considering my unique quirks and “idiot-synchrasies” (yes, I know that’s not a real word, but what is language if it won’t do what we need it to do?). I get what my mom used to call “big ideas” as in, “what’s the big idea, anyway?” Not all of them are fuzzy, warm, or particularly comfortable for others to consider, so some of them I keep to myself until I know a person better. One is my lifelong fascination with cemeteries, or graveyards. Most folks really don’t understand this interest in walking, talking (to myself and whoever else may be listening), snapping pictures, and writing in a graveyard. I only know it has offered me images, ideas, and inspiration countless times. Oh, you may call it ghoulish, but there it is. Never considered whistlin’ past one, but I have also never driven past a country graveyard without wishing to go spend a few hours wandering around . . . just being. I am not talking about those manicured, devoid of standing stones, everything-at-groundlevel jobs. No sir. I speak of the places where breezes tickle overgrown brush—where grasshoppers and grass burrs await your step with anticipation. This is true no matter where I find myself: Anyplace , Texas, the South or Southwest, Washington state, Ireland, or Scotland. I really come alive in a graveyard. I can recall many times in my childhood, which seemed fairly normal to me (but what do I know from “normal”?), daytrips to graveyards to visit family members who had “gone on to be with the Lord” or had “passed away to a better place.” If when you died you got to spend lots of time in a graveyard, I wanted to do that, too. Die, I mean. Not in an everything’s-dreadful-think-I’ll-justlie -right-down-and-die sort of way, but in a now-I-can-really-learnsomething -important sort of way. An expression I heard as a child 211 that has stuck with me all my days is this: “Whenever a person dies, an entire library of experience dies, too.” While I have no idea who came up with this heartrending bit of wisdom, being a huge book lover and an avid reader, this idea still saddens me. Consider it: an entire library . . . gone, forever. Whether an Alexandrian treasure or a lifetime stuffed into a few hours on earth, each human spirit comprises a collection of memories, each unique to the one whose mind recorded it. I understood the gravity of this as I strolled within any number of cemeteries as a child, reading carefully each inscription, pondering the significance of the words or symbols that appeared in stone, weathered and often broken: lambs, crosses, open Bibles, hands holding doves, and lichen-covered rubble with all meaning lost. Occasions for mourning may bring me to these places of rest (or unrest), but curiosity beckons me back as often as I can grab a camera and go. I must admit that many of the life skills that my blessed parents tried to instill in my sisters and myself were introduced, reinforced, and ingrained while wandering through graveyards. Let me explain. Beginning academic skills were built through sounding out names and inscriptions on stones. Those silent requiems to individuals immortalized by their contemporaries who erected the monument seen by generations of small children, forming syllables, working out basic math calculations—birth dates, death dates, wedding dates—all vitally important to lives of those who likely stood at the side of an open hole and wept. Surely these were worthy of my reading practice. The text was often difficult to decipher in that polysyllabic biblical names were frequently utilized in decades past, along with “archaic speech” of formal usage—the King James eloquence became my own. Sounds even better spoken aloud. What were these people like? What thoughts filled their minds as they buried their dead? How did their voices sound? In my reverie, I learned silence. Scriptural references to being still and knowing “He is God” were made tangible to me, as I rocked on tennis-shoed feet with the blowing of warm Texas breezes in gardens of stone memory. There is a special softness to wind in cemetery silences. Did you ever notice this? 212 Thoughts, Musings, and Pure Speculation History speaks volumes in a graveyard. Plague, natural...

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