i helped a man find a grave site at calvary today. i think he wanted section 4, avenue P, range 7. he was standing at Avenue O, range 5 or 6, so i was easily able to ifnd it for him. he thanked me and said “now i have to find my mother.” i am glad i didn’t say anything in response to that because i thought he meant he had to find his mother’s burial site. in fact, his mother was there at the cemetery, wandering arounnd some other part of Section 4 in search of this same burials site. what if i had asked the man “oh, where is she buried?” he might have gotten a laugh, as he seemed like an easygoing type.

i felt like the local authority on section 4 today, (Section IV, that is), since i was treasure-hunting for old, old burials from pre-1876. it’s been good fun, this project, which has been on-again/off-again for a few months. and the sun today felt righteous. i got burned, and it’s all good. tomorrow it will be 50s and raining again, but today i got all 80-degrees and summerlike out there.

i don’t know if htis little diversion will amount to anything more than more needless distraction but it’s a fun litlt ehunt. most of the graves are deteriorated to a point of near-dirt, but others look like they were built yesterday. marble was the tombstone material of choice for the wealthy, but evidently they had no regard for posterity since marble must have been known to not weather the elements very well, even then. maybe it was not known to rot so easily. probbaly not. marble was actually quite cheap at the time on account of some loopholes the funerary artists exploited. they drafted the designs and such here, then sent the plans to Italy for execution. marble was stupid cheap in Italy at the time, and the objects were sent back to the U.S. duty-free because they were works of art. scam! this sort of thing could inspire a revival in cheap funerary art in the yewnited states.

oh, and i heard the voices today! loud and clear, a male voice pronouncing “number nine”, not just the number but the phrase “number nine”, his voice echoed and deflected off tombstones in an impossible way, a voice so clear. and later i heard more of the same phenomenon coming from the Kosciuszko. so i have not been fantasizing or hallucinating about this, and though i never doubted that i had heard this, the voices rise far less frequently in the non-summer months. i don’t know if sound travels more nimbly in higher temperatures but i know that vehicles on the bridge are more likely to have their windows open during warmer weather, and from those open window the voices float into the hillsides with their stone petals.