I went and saw Joel Dossey this week.  I got a little lost driving through Mansfield, but I managed to find the graveyard.  Finding the headstone was another matter entirely.  There was an old, gray-haired black man sitting on a scooter smoking a cigarette who helped me find it. He was like some surreal hybrid of Charon and the Gravedigger from the fifth act of "Hamlet." We even had a similar comedy of a homonym conversation.  He drove around while I waited, and when he found the headstone he stood still and slowly beckoned me with a full motion of his arm, and then slowly and quietly walked away.  It was a little cold and very windy; the grass looked more like a green ocean, than the beards of graves.  I didn't stay long, and I won't burden you with my thoughts as I stood there, but I will say that I could feel the muscles in my upper back loosen like I had been on flexorfil. Going to a cemetary to visit someone, always seems like such a strange and unpleasant activity to perform, and, perhaps in some cases it is, but cemetaries are also places of peace, not the peace of its residents wrapped in their silence, but more akin to the peace that comes from right action; that, perhaps, one of the most fulfilling actions we can take is respecting the dead.  I don't know, maybe it was the peace of Joel, which he had in life in spades, reaching up through the grass rolling in the wind.

On a different yet related note, I was sitting here at the Ruta Maya coffee/ale house (which is fantastic, and I highly reccommend for coffee and lunch if you are in San Antonio, it's downtown at the corner of Soleded & Martin) having breakfast when a song come on that was an exact expression of how I felt in the Summer of 1988, just substitute Birmingham for New York City.  Has it really been 20 years? It just brims with hope and optimism in Love.  I rarely find these things so I'd thought I'd put it here.  "Hey There Delilah," Plain White T's