Tales From the Cemetery

 

 It's the time of year when so many people start to decorate their homes and lawns with Halloween themes. We drove down a street today just looking at new areas, and one house we passed was covered top to bottom with witches and tombstones, spiders, pumpkins, cob webs, ghosts and Lord knows what all else. I don't really know what pumpkins have to do with Halloween, except that they are harvested this time of year. It's funny that a holiday that is supposed to be spooky utilizes one of the same icons that Thanksgiving is known for. Does anyone have pumpkin pie for Halloween? I wonder how that would go over. The neighborhood kids knock on your door and instead of bags of candy corn or popcorn balls, you give them a piece of pumpkin pie. Would they soap your windows or string toilet paper around your trees if you didn't top the pie with whipped cream? It's hard to say. Kids can be vindictive.

I'm reminded of a conversation that I had with some friends from my neighborhood so many years ago. We were talking about memorable Halloweens or some such thing, and they mentioned that when they were living in Findley, Ohio, they went to one of their neighbor's homes and when they said -"TRICK OR TREAT- the old fart sack said "TRICK" and poured soup in their bags. What a jackass. Those were the days when all of your groceries were bagged in paper bags, there were no plastic bags when  I was a boy. That's how old I am. When you went trick or treating, you used a paper bag; unless of course you could get your mom to agree to let you have a pillow case, which was a lot stronger. My mom made me settle for the ol' paper grocery bags. You had to pray it didn't rain.

Anyway, for whatever reason, graveyards are supposed to be spooky, and I guess they are if you were to walk through one in the middle of the night. I've never tried that. Jan and I went through the Marion Cemetery once or twice though when we were dating. It was a beautiful place, full of old trees and sloping hills and of course multitudes of gravestones. It was really quite peaceful.

For some reason I was thinking about back when I was young and I recalled riding my bike through the Marion Cemetery. I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, and when I ran across a spot in the back of the cemetery with a mound of old flowers and green styrofoam blocks, I decided to check it out. It was obvious that the flowers had been discarded after they had been used for a ceremony at some of the grave sites. Being the little twerp I was, I sorted through them and picked out some of the better ones to bring home to mom. It never dawned on me that it was probably not a good thing to do. What really caught my attention though, wasn't the flowers, but the green, plastic, spear-like points that the flowers were set in so they would stay in the styrofoam. Being the genius I was, I figured I'd scarf up a pocket full of them to make spears and arrows from some of the branches of the bushes that grew around my home. It's been so long ago, that I can't remember if my mom was delighted with the flowers or horrified. I might have told her where they came from, I can't recall. Sometimes the less said, the better.  I do remember that the spear points were rather useless as weapons. I don't doubt that if you had poked someone in the eye with one it would have done major damage, but to just toss at a tree, or a target more solid than Jello, they were no good. Because they were plastic they broke on impact. I don't think I ever went back for more flowers or spear points, which is probably a good thing. The spirits that hung around there might have gotten irritated.