Riffing On The Cemetery

Riff #1:

I came across someone walking a dog through the cemetery recently.

I immediately began to wonder what kind of vibe a dog picks up around the dead. Let's face it, animals have a sixth and seventh and tenth sense. They know things we don't; they experience things in a completely different way than humans do. Probably a more complete and perfectly intuitive way.

I don't imagine he felt any kind of death vibe, not in any way he would understand, because he doesn't know he's going to die. But he must have sensed a human presence, a presence quite different than the one his owner emanates.

I'm sure his nose was working overtime.

I truly hope he was not able to make any type of connection between the dead and his owner or the dead and himself.

Animals deserve their innocence. It is a large part of what makes them so easy to love.

Riff #2:

Sometimes I roll through the cemetery focused on individual gravestones. Looking for stories, looking for names, looking for history, looking for beauty.

Sometimes I just park in a spot that gives me a broad view of a large number of graves. There is something daunting about seeing hundreds of gravestones laid out before me and knowing they are only the tip of the iceberg relative to the total number of people buried in that cemetery. Just one cemetery in a city with numerous cemeteries.

I did that recently and it really got to me.

I was driving back to the office (always a mistake) and I had to stop at a red light. I looked to my left at the parking lot of a municipal building. It was angle parking so the cars were splayed out before me in every direction. There were a lot of them.

It struck me with force and clarity that there was not a hell of a lot of difference between those parked cars and the gravestones.