Refracted Neurons

I think you already know how this goes: I'm on vacation, driving down the road when suddenly I see it. "I wanna go there," I point at a cemetery. My husband laughs.  Here we are in Hawaii and this is what I want to do.  But come on, check out this cemetery: Don't blink. Whenever I visit a new cemetery, I always try to find some history on the grounds themselves.  With the exception of Comet Lodge, this is usually a fruitless task.  I even tried the County Assessor Office this time, but it doesn't seem to go far back enough in time. For some reason, I couldn't even find a sign, so I had to drop a pin on my location and do a web search.  The cemetery name is Saint Catherine's, and it's a little over a century old.  It was consecrated in 1887, and some of the stones are from that time frame.  It is still an active cemetery and there seems to be plenty of room for new stones.  As you may have guessed by the name, it is a Catholic cemeter...

Plato, as you might remember, had a little bit of an obsession with shapes. He believed that there was a realm where shapes existed in a perfected form. And because of that, I’ve always made fun of him behind his back. The thing is, though, I’m guilty of the same thing. I have ideas of how things should look that have absolutely no basis in reality. For example, I have ideas about cemeteries. In the abstract, they have cross-shaped tombstones, wrought iron fences, and there are burial mounds. Have I ever seen a cemetery like this? No, well at least not until around a year ago. We were driving on the highway from Phoenix to Casa Grande when I saw it. “What is that?” I asked my husband. What I should have said was, “Pull over!” because I’ve been low-key thinking about this place for about a year. So since we were in the area, I decided to drop in and pay my respects. Now that’s what a cemetery is supposed to look like. The cemetery is named the Sacaton Cemetery ...

You know how gossip works, right?  If you don't, go play a game of Telephone and then come back and talk to me.  Or better yet, talk about me to someone else. I had one of those moments last week when someone said to me, "I've heard you're good at finding people." My response was, "Well, that's not entirely correct.  I'm good at finding dead people."  Here's the thing about dead people: they don't move, they don't marry, and they technically don't divorce.  (Don't think about that last one for too long, it will just make watching The Sound of Music awkward.)  There are also protections around the identities of live people that there aren't around the dead. Obligatory image of a graveyard. So I expected to get no where. I first started using search engines in a time before Google . . . a time when dinosaurs were terraforming the earth and human kind was living underground - Sorry, got a little off topic th...

No, I'm not running around looking for random dead people anymore.  I don't care if they show up on my doorstep, the answer is "no." Dead people I know, on the other hand, sure. I'm in Arizona this week, but before I left Seattle, I went to visit a friend who had passed away.  It's not too hard to find people with  Findagrave.com  . . . they even have an ap, you know, it case you need to haunt people's graves on the go.  This friend was at Evergreen-Washelli, which is really close to my house.  It's a lovely cemetery, but it's HUGE.  It also is bisected by Highway 99, so you want to make sure you are on the right side of the highway to begin with. Fortunately, Findagrave gives GPS coordinates.  I looked at the coordinates and was like, "Huh, he appears to be buried in a residential neighborhood."  After everything that happened with Comet Lodge, I wasn't too surprised or alarmed by this.  Instead, I started browsing the Evergr...