Tell Me When To Visit The Dead Man Jim

I want to tell you about the many young people I saw huddled in Père Lachaise Cemetery around the tombstone of the long-deceased music artist named Jim Morrison. They may have been grieving, the young people, I am not certain. I was simply curious. The burial plot was not hard to find as there was a constant stream of serious and solemn followers making their pilgrimage toward his grave. I think I smelled pot. But this article isn't about The Doors and Jim Morrison, nor his common law wife, even though it is interesting that they both died of heroin overdoses at the age of twenty-seven though four years apart. To me that is interesting. I am actually a little put off in the specific way Jim died, but the fact that she died for the same reason from the same drug gets my attention. But this article, rather, is about Cave Hill, another beautiful cemetery not as famous as this Paris monument is, and not even as famous as the other Paris one called Montparnasse. It was there I stood at the foot of Samuel Beckett's grave in Montparnasse and I wish I could tell you how thrilling that was but we must get on to this story of Cave Hill or else I will get off track and even tell how I made my wife and teenage kid ride two trains further north of Paris to see the graves of Vincent and Theo van Gogh up there in Auvers-sur-Oise. You could say I like to look at grave sites but that is not entirely true. I actually feel quite disagreeable around most cemeteries simply because they are so ugly and tacky, and the people buried in them mean nothing to me. That doesn't apply to my own plot I have up in Alabaster, Michigan. My Finnish grandparents are buried up there in that cold sandy ground, as well as their infant child and their WWII soldier son due to an auto accident while hitch-hiking home at the end of that same war, and for those three or four reasons Alabaster means something more to me than most cemeteries do. I own the vacant space of ground somewhere between the four of them to crawl into some day, and I like that idea. Come to think of it, make that five. I forgot that Charlie's father is buried in there too. My grandfather was named Charlie and I think I'll include a poem here that I wrote about him several years ago.

Woodshed


Charlie left them
back where they lay
bleeding
back by the wooden block,

where one careless chop
had taken them both off,
badly.

I remember
he would stuff Grandma’s
old hose inside the toes of
all his shoes. Hinge around
the farm,
unfortunately.

He died, but we saved his laces.
Tied them to our waists.
Hung from a slide until
somebody saved us.

Anyway, the cemetery is old and in the woods, and our plot actually faces Lake Huron and we all have a view of that gigantic body of water. Figuratively, because we'll all be dead. But we don't have famous people buried in our Alabaster cemetery that I am aware of. But there are a few in Cave Hill.

Cave Hill Cemetery is located in Louisville, Kentucky. George Rogers Clark and Colonel Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame are both buried in this beautiful cemetery. I suppose I'll let my photographs do my talking for me from here on out. She's pretty special, Cave Hill, and apart from the new sections, it reminds me of the great cemeteries in Paris. You have to admit the French know something about aesthetics. Or let's just call it having good taste, something the USA could use a whole lot more of.

All images copyright 2010 by M Sarki