Time for autumnal walks at Calvary and Bellefontaine Cemeteries, a tradition of mine since the early 2000's when Paul came up with the idea to take our Creative Writing field trips there. The weather today was perfect--65 degrees--breezy, varying between overcast and sunny. Just spooky enough for an hour and a half walk with my camera, journal and coffee. I was glad I chose Calvary today. For the last three years or so, I've forgone Calvary for Bellefontaine because the latter, being multi-denominational, has the most diverse head stones and inscriptions. But I've become so familiar with Bellefontaine over the last few years, that my walks have lost the eerie meandering feel that I so love about roaming through cemeteries. Incidentally, I noticed an empty condom package littering the otherwise pristine grounds--it reinforced the morning's themes of sex and death.
I found plenty of new details--and also ran into some stones and monuments that I'd seen before. Coming up a hill and around a corner, my pleasant Halloween-type experience was interrupted by the site of Mev Puleo's grave. Puleo was a photo journalist who attended SLU around the same time I did. I didn't know her personally, but her legacy in the field of social justice is legendary. Before dying of a brain tumor at 32, she authored a book called The Struggle is One, After walking up a hill and rounding a corner, I ran into her grave and remembered a fluke sighting. When I was living in Boston, I spotted Puleo walking through Harvard Square with (I'm assuming) her fiancee while I was taking a cigarette break on the front steps of Wordsworth. This was probably some time in 1990. I was in the throws of self-centered depression. Puleo looked very happy. This was probably about four years or so before she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, six years before she died.
I'd been sort of looking for Tennessee Williams' grave--or at least--the Italian section of Calvary with all of the photographic portraits on the headstones, but happily, I couldn't find them--which means I can save that for another day. Instead, I ran into the Carr Children Monuments. I always forget they are in Calvary and not Bellefontaine. Very sad tale of death of toddlers--but the tombstones, once meant to be comforting reminders to their parents after their deaths, possibly of cholera--as there was an epidemic in St. Louis around that time--are the ultimate eerie experience now. This morning, I was not alone. A couple with expensive cameras got out of their car to photograph the monuments as I was walking by.
Even though I couldn't find the Italian section, there was no shortage of graves of the Irish. I couldn't resist photographing Patrick Mahoney's grave..Who knows when he lived or died--what seems most important--and I agree--is that "he enjoyed it all." I spotted an Irish flag, something I either hadn't noticed before or is relatively new, flying over the Dolan graves, next to a large monument inscribed with "God save Ireland." This kind of cheered me up and, walking a bit farther, I stopped to finish my coffee and journal. From my vantage point on a marble step that had broken away from one of the monuments, I could still see the flag in the distance.
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