Of Specters and Spirits . . .
Cemeteries are a part of life. They’re a bigger part of death but, for those of us still around, they are part of our existence. We visit them, revere them, even fear them.
I’ve had my share of grave graveyard experiences, including burying close friends and family members. But there have been others not involving actual burials. And, at this season of Halloween, cemeteries even play into that frighteningly fun time.
Who hasn’t passed the neighborhood house where mock tombstones are inscribed with “Here Lies” names of such notables as “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “The Mummy” and other denizens of the dark night? How deliciously macabre is that?
The cemeteries of New Orleans are actually tourist attractions, where visitors come to see the ornate above-ground tombs that hold the remains of generations of whole families. They are truly works of art, even attracting thieves who rob them of statuary that they intend to re-sell. Fortunately, most of them are usually caught and convicted and the artifacts returned. The ancient crime of grave-robbing, it seems, is still with us.
Also still with us is the belief that the spirits of the dead haunt cemeteries, hovering near their final resting places for all time. I cannot say this is true or untrue, even after a late-night experience in a rural South Louisiana graveyard.
Having heard about making tomb recordings with a tape recorder, I placed a running tape recorder onto the tombstone of a young man who lost his life while working on a railroad more than 10 years earlier. I returned later for the recorder.
I listened to the tape, which recorded nothing more than muted night sounds such as distant crickets chirping – until about halfway through.
The distinct, muffled sound of a train passing, with clacking of wheels-on-rails and the whistle even blowing shocked me. The nearest railroad was miles away through thick woods. I told my wife Terri about that long ago night so we plan to make a taping at an old cemetery not far from where we live in Lee County.
Nothing, though, approaches my cemetery experience as a young teenager, when my family lived on the Presidio of San Francisco, the U.S. Army post on the tip of the California peninsula. I was 14 and had attended a movie at the post theater; it ended later than I anticipated, more than an hour after the post shuttle bus had made its final 10 p.m. round.
I was left to walk home, a marathon of miles if I followed the Bayside roads around the perimeter of the post, or only a few miles if I traversed cross-country to the Pacific side of the post and home. Problem was, the only route I knew for sure was through the National Cemetery adjacent to the theater, all this on a nearly moonless, eerily hazy night as midnight neared.
I stood at the tall iron gates for a few moments, steeling myself to the journey ahead – more than a quarter-mile up a hill past thousands of white tombstones, including occasional fresh graves of Vietnam dead. I had never walked so fast; I didn’t look back and I didn’t look to the sides. I looked straight ahead, concentrating on the thick brick wall I would eventually have to scale if I made it to the rear of the cemetery alive.
The wall loomed ahead and I jumped high enough to wrap an arm on top. I clawed and scratched with hands and feet, fearful something would grab my dangling legs as I struggled up and over. I dropped to the other side in total darkness since trees blocked out what little moonlight shone onto the cemetery.
I made it through the graveyard but was still not in the clear. All around me lay tombstones, a dozen or more seemingly glowing in the blackness. No time to think about them; it was time to get out of the woods, as far from the cemetery as fast as I could.
So I lived to tell about it. But as terrifying as the cemetery was to a kid, I still think about the discarded tombstones tossed over the fence. And I’ve never figured out why; it’s the specter that still haunts me about that night.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Bands of Brothers & Sisters
A Sure Sign of Football Season
It’s easy to tell when the high school football season nears. Just look for the marching bands; when they’re out rehearsing their music and moves, football players can’t be far behind.
I spent several great years in the Sam Houston High School Texan Marching Band. That time was the best part of those final school years in Arlington, Texas.
We were a big band, marching about 144. It took three buses to get us anywhere.
The marching band was a big deal back in the late 1960s; it was an integral part of Texas high school football. We were living “Friday Night Lights” decades before that book was written and the movie made.
My wife Terri performed on band color guards for Saltillo High School, some of whose current members are in the photo, and at Itawamba Community College; she, too, says band fostered some of her best school memories.
Our seasons started long before we marched onto the field for the opening game. It was midsummer when we began gathering on the empty parking lot of the school, where yard lines, sidelines, goal lines and hash marks were painted on the asphalt.
With midday temperatures generally above 100 degrees, band director Robert Rober had us come out a few hours in the early morning and return a few more hours in the evening. We studied elaborate field drills and practiced music separately, working on the elements until they were perfected; then it was time to bring them together.
We spent more weeks perfecting the whole show. About the time the football team considered itself ready for action, the band was ready, too. They hit the field and so did we.
There were good reasons I preferred the band to playing football. First and foremost, I could play music but couldn’t play football. Another reason I preferred the band is those buses I mentioned earlier.
When you played football, you climbed back onto the team bus after an away game and returned to school surrounded by dirty, sweaty football players. In the band, you rode back to school with at least half a bus full of girls, neither dirty nor sweaty. No-brainer? You betcha!
My high school social life, for the most part, revolved around the band. I hung out with my fellow band members and most of my friends were bandsmen; the camaraderie was palpable. In fact, my best friend Andy Miller was the drum major; he was tall like many drum majors tend to be, while I was short – quite the Mutt-and-Jeff pair.
Maybe best of all was the sense of accomplishment that came with performing. You could put that uniform on, march and play powerful music in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of cheering people and it was exhilarating.
These days I periodically get to spend time with a high school band or two during their summer practices, writing a story about their preparations for the coming football season. A decade ago, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with the Grenada High School band, one of the best in the nation.
Director David Daigneault drew students to his band like iron filings to a magnet; it seemed most of the school marched in the band. Football season was over and they were practicing to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.
The sheer force of their sound and precision of their moves was awesome. As they marched, I walked along with them, shooting pictures and relishing the moment. Like 30 years before then, the hair on my neck bristled and goose bumps popped up on my arms.
It was great to be back.
END
It’s easy to tell when the high school football season nears. Just look for the marching bands; when they’re out rehearsing their music and moves, football players can’t be far behind.
I spent several great years in the Sam Houston High School Texan Marching Band. That time was the best part of those final school years in Arlington, Texas.
We were a big band, marching about 144. It took three buses to get us anywhere.
The marching band was a big deal back in the late 1960s; it was an integral part of Texas high school football. We were living “Friday Night Lights” decades before that book was written and the movie made.
My wife Terri performed on band color guards for Saltillo High School, some of whose current members are in the photo, and at Itawamba Community College; she, too, says band fostered some of her best school memories.
Our seasons started long before we marched onto the field for the opening game. It was midsummer when we began gathering on the empty parking lot of the school, where yard lines, sidelines, goal lines and hash marks were painted on the asphalt.
With midday temperatures generally above 100 degrees, band director Robert Rober had us come out a few hours in the early morning and return a few more hours in the evening. We studied elaborate field drills and practiced music separately, working on the elements until they were perfected; then it was time to bring them together.
We spent more weeks perfecting the whole show. About the time the football team considered itself ready for action, the band was ready, too. They hit the field and so did we.
There were good reasons I preferred the band to playing football. First and foremost, I could play music but couldn’t play football. Another reason I preferred the band is those buses I mentioned earlier.
When you played football, you climbed back onto the team bus after an away game and returned to school surrounded by dirty, sweaty football players. In the band, you rode back to school with at least half a bus full of girls, neither dirty nor sweaty. No-brainer? You betcha!
My high school social life, for the most part, revolved around the band. I hung out with my fellow band members and most of my friends were bandsmen; the camaraderie was palpable. In fact, my best friend Andy Miller was the drum major; he was tall like many drum majors tend to be, while I was short – quite the Mutt-and-Jeff pair.
Maybe best of all was the sense of accomplishment that came with performing. You could put that uniform on, march and play powerful music in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of cheering people and it was exhilarating.
These days I periodically get to spend time with a high school band or two during their summer practices, writing a story about their preparations for the coming football season. A decade ago, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with the Grenada High School band, one of the best in the nation.
Director David Daigneault drew students to his band like iron filings to a magnet; it seemed most of the school marched in the band. Football season was over and they were practicing to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.
The sheer force of their sound and precision of their moves was awesome. As they marched, I walked along with them, shooting pictures and relishing the moment. Like 30 years before then, the hair on my neck bristled and goose bumps popped up on my arms.
It was great to be back.
END
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Our Proliferating Neighbors
Wile E. Coyote Lives
We lost a cat last month. Dora was one of two cats we got a few years ago from our across-the-street neighbors, Linda and Charlie Magers.
And she was my wife Terri’s favorite; Dora preferred Terri’s attention to anyone else’s. Then one night Dora didn’t come home.
It had been only a few weeks since our next-door neighbors’ cat came up missing. When Rhonda Jackson asked me if I’d seen their cat, I suggested that it was possible a coyote got her.
Coyote. That was the first thing I thought of when Dora didn’t come home.
I had been hearing distant yelping and howling of coyotes at dusk for months. They have probably been out there much longer but I just never took the time to listen.
After Dora didn’t come home, I walked a perimeter around much of our acre-and-a-half. I found sign that a dog-sized mammal had recently been around our property – and there are no outside dogs around. That pretty much settled it for me.
Then, early in the pre-dawn of a weekday late-June morning as I opened the living room shutters for the day, I caught a blur of movement out the corner of my eye. The blur, a grayish dog, I guessed, had come around the Jacksons’ fence and into my garden area.
It began running ghostlike up the hill toward the side yard and that’s when I realized it was a coyote and not a dog. The animal stopped in the side yard so I slipped out the front door and onto the porch. The coyote, much smaller than I had expected one to be, stood 30 yards from me, concentrating on the four-lane highway a couple hundred feet farther on.
I watched it for a minute or more as it nervously danced around, pacing back and forth, in obvious indecision as to its next move. Brave the increasing traffic and cross the highway or find another route?
The coyote never saw me so I slipped back into the house, trying to decide whether to get a gun or a camera. After all, this could be the varmint that gobbled up my wife’s cat and the neighbors’ cats (yes, there have been a least a half-dozen cats go missing in our rural setting).
I told Terri there was a coyote in the yard and returned to the porch. By then, the animal had made its decision and was gone. Where it went, I don’t know. But I figure it will be back, maybe trying to get Callie, our remaining cat.
Years ago in the West, I saw coyote carcasses hung on barbed wire fences; it took me a while to figure out why they were there. A friend of mine once asked me why ranchers did that.
“If you were going to cross a fence line and there were human bodies hung on it,” I asked him, “would you cross over into that property?”
But I have no barbed-wire fence and wouldn’t hang carcasses on it if I did, so I’m still left in a quandary. What do I do about the coyote problem? My friend Gary Dixon told me that his Kansas City “super-suburban” neighborhood has been having a bad problem with the canines; in just the previous few weeks, seven dogs had been killed by coyotes. One dog, he reported, was saved when its owner literally pulled her pet out of the coyote’s jaws.
“The city is trying to decide whether to hire someone to kill them or to capture and relocate them,” he wrote.
Relocating might be an exercise in futility since the space created would be quickly refilled by other coyotes, a very successful, quickly proliferating species.
And that proliferation has cost us some beloved companions; we lost another cat in identical circumstances nearly six years ago when we first moved into our house.
Another friend, wildlife biologist Ron Nassar, said I basically have three options: poisoning, shooting or doing nothing.
Preserving wildlife is a noble quest and I certainly support it. I’m just not sure how much of it I want in my yard.
END
We lost a cat last month. Dora was one of two cats we got a few years ago from our across-the-street neighbors, Linda and Charlie Magers.
And she was my wife Terri’s favorite; Dora preferred Terri’s attention to anyone else’s. Then one night Dora didn’t come home.
It had been only a few weeks since our next-door neighbors’ cat came up missing. When Rhonda Jackson asked me if I’d seen their cat, I suggested that it was possible a coyote got her.
Coyote. That was the first thing I thought of when Dora didn’t come home.
I had been hearing distant yelping and howling of coyotes at dusk for months. They have probably been out there much longer but I just never took the time to listen.
After Dora didn’t come home, I walked a perimeter around much of our acre-and-a-half. I found sign that a dog-sized mammal had recently been around our property – and there are no outside dogs around. That pretty much settled it for me.
Then, early in the pre-dawn of a weekday late-June morning as I opened the living room shutters for the day, I caught a blur of movement out the corner of my eye. The blur, a grayish dog, I guessed, had come around the Jacksons’ fence and into my garden area.
It began running ghostlike up the hill toward the side yard and that’s when I realized it was a coyote and not a dog. The animal stopped in the side yard so I slipped out the front door and onto the porch. The coyote, much smaller than I had expected one to be, stood 30 yards from me, concentrating on the four-lane highway a couple hundred feet farther on.
I watched it for a minute or more as it nervously danced around, pacing back and forth, in obvious indecision as to its next move. Brave the increasing traffic and cross the highway or find another route?
The coyote never saw me so I slipped back into the house, trying to decide whether to get a gun or a camera. After all, this could be the varmint that gobbled up my wife’s cat and the neighbors’ cats (yes, there have been a least a half-dozen cats go missing in our rural setting).
I told Terri there was a coyote in the yard and returned to the porch. By then, the animal had made its decision and was gone. Where it went, I don’t know. But I figure it will be back, maybe trying to get Callie, our remaining cat.
Years ago in the West, I saw coyote carcasses hung on barbed wire fences; it took me a while to figure out why they were there. A friend of mine once asked me why ranchers did that.
“If you were going to cross a fence line and there were human bodies hung on it,” I asked him, “would you cross over into that property?”
But I have no barbed-wire fence and wouldn’t hang carcasses on it if I did, so I’m still left in a quandary. What do I do about the coyote problem? My friend Gary Dixon told me that his Kansas City “super-suburban” neighborhood has been having a bad problem with the canines; in just the previous few weeks, seven dogs had been killed by coyotes. One dog, he reported, was saved when its owner literally pulled her pet out of the coyote’s jaws.
“The city is trying to decide whether to hire someone to kill them or to capture and relocate them,” he wrote.
Relocating might be an exercise in futility since the space created would be quickly refilled by other coyotes, a very successful, quickly proliferating species.
And that proliferation has cost us some beloved companions; we lost another cat in identical circumstances nearly six years ago when we first moved into our house.
Another friend, wildlife biologist Ron Nassar, said I basically have three options: poisoning, shooting or doing nothing.
Preserving wildlife is a noble quest and I certainly support it. I’m just not sure how much of it I want in my yard.
END
I've Finally Arrived
Welcome to my first blog and its first posting. I am a freelance writer/photographer/editor who has been at it for almost a quarter-century, now.
Its name refers to the fact that, hey, my view is from the South. It's where my home has been most of my life so there was little sense in calling it by another geographic name. Anyway, look for various political, economic, fun and personal posts here that may help you (or me), educate you (or me), entertain you (or me) and maybe even make us laugh.
I particularly look forward to a lively repartee as responses are received.
Richard Cotton
Saltillo, Mississippi
Its name refers to the fact that, hey, my view is from the South. It's where my home has been most of my life so there was little sense in calling it by another geographic name. Anyway, look for various political, economic, fun and personal posts here that may help you (or me), educate you (or me), entertain you (or me) and maybe even make us laugh.
I particularly look forward to a lively repartee as responses are received.
Richard Cotton
Saltillo, Mississippi
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