I have had two weeks of intense
experiences with the pups and the cemetery, have met some very interesting people,
living and dead, and caught my first ghostly image on camera.
I was trying to pull Beanie away from
trying to kill lizards (by the way he hasn’t come close to catching one even as
they dash between his paws) in 98 degree heat.
I have begun calling him “Lizard Killer” in homage (read this word with
a French accent) to Julie from “Julie and Julia” who had to “man-up and kill
the damn” lobster. Her husband played
this song and changed the lyrics to “Lobster Killer” in order to tease her fear
of boiling a live crustacean. It’s one
of my favorite parts of the movie. I wish
my blog was as popular and I could ask my thousands of readers for money—I’m so
poor I’m about to go panhandling on the streets of Farmington just to pay rent
and eat. I would go panhandling in the
gardens—I have a great many friends there who would be more than generous from
keeping me homeless and the Internet flowing.
Unfortunately, they don’t carry money on them, so I have to do something
else—perhaps I’ll have a garage sale, give blood, or donate a kidney—the bad one
which always gives me a kidney infection—ha!
Back to the ghost.
One of my friends said he wanted to see my
garden friends—and he wasn’t talking about headstones or bronze plates. Still, I’ve been taking pictures of some of
the really beautiful markers—perhaps I’ll show you my collection then you can
see the workmanship I have been admiring.
That’s when I saw one which reminded me
of my deceased daddy. It had a
semi-wreath of pine bows and pine cones with a big ol’ buck between the dates—obviously
the resident was a hunter like my daddy—who often fed us when I was a girl with
deer, elk, moose, duck, pheasant, and a yearly lamb he bought from the Basques
who drove their herds of fat, wooly sheep right down 15th Street in
Pocatello.
Anyway, I had to take a picture.
I turned off the Glen Miller I had been
playing for the World War II generation which make up the majority of the
garden’s live-ins to capture the hunting theme.
But every time I clicked the camera, a huge dark shadow kept the image
from becoming a clear photographic record.
I tried three times, each one thwarted (I love that word—“thwarted”—one
of the few really English words with Anglo-Saxon, Middle English origins, not
from Latin or Greek)…each one thwarted by a long, dark, thick shadow.
Once, Beanie sniffed at the plate, which,
when I looked at it without the camera, did not have any shadow on it, near it
or beside it. There wasn’t a single tree
or bush near it in order to cast such an end of the day darkness.
Then I figured it out.
“Charlie,” I said very nicely, “I’m sorry
if I’m offending you by taking a picture of your name plate; it’s just that it
reminds me of my late daddy. He would
like the deer.”
As soon as I said this, the shadow on
the name plate through the camera’s lens disappeared, and I thought I took a
clear shot at that moment. But another
weird thing happened. When I got home to
look at my snap-shots, the good one was gone and all I had were the shadowed ones.
I went back a couple of days later (due
to downpours of flashfloods) and took a clear picture. If you look at that last image, you can tell
it was cloudy because everything is grey, compared to the sunny ones with the
weird shadow.
Charlie may have thwarted me at first,
but I got the shot in the end. Shot—shot—like
shooting a deer—a pun my daddy would have chuckled at if he had coined it.
You look at the photos and try to
explain it—‘cause I can’t.
My first picture of Charlie's grave.
My third picture.
My second picture--remember there isn't anything near this grave that would cast this shadow.
Charlie's grave 3 days later--cloudy.
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Daddy the big game hunter.
When daddy saw this display, he pretended he was holding a rifle and made gun sounds as if he was shooting it. Momma and I laughed.
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