Recently I was walking through Riverside Cemetery as I do every year, usually in autumn. This time I had a mission to find a gravesite by request of a family in Georgia whose grandparents are buried there. I started on one end and spent quite a bit of time roaming around and checking each grave for the name. After about and hour and a half of searching, I finally found the headstone in the last section I checked. Ironically, it was right beside one of our family plots! 

 

While on my search, I got to thinking of all the fun things we used to do in the cemetery when we were kids. Since there were no computer games, cell phones, or Internet in those days, we had to find places to have fun and to practice our mischievous activities. In previous years, I have written accounts of goofing around in such places as the Township Dump, Heckleman's Sohio Station, TEACO beer joint, Bar 61, and other places that happened to be graced with our presence at the moment. Now, you may be thinking how in the world can kids have fun in a cemetery of all places. Well, read on...

 

In those days before any of us were old enough to get our driver's licenses, all travel was either by walking or more than likely riding our bicycles.  One of our fun places was Riverside Cemetery at the south end of Berlin Heights. On most occasions, the cemetery gang consisted of Tim, Tom, Gary, and Tom's sister Jane, and yours truly. One of our favorite games was hide and seek. If you have never played hide and seek in a cemetery, you missed a lot of fun. It was a great place to play this. Since there were hundreds of headstones to hide behind, it was very challenging indeed. The best hiding place was to lay down behind a short narrow long headstone. The only problem with this, however, was that it was very difficult to switch to the other side without being seen as the seeker passed near your hiding place. We usually started out in the middle of the cemetery, which gave us the whole place to hide. On one occasion, all of us were finally found except for Gary. When we admitted defeat by yelling that we had given up, he emerged from behind the maintenance shed at the west edge. We immediately called "no fair". Immediately after that instance, we made a rule that the hiding was henceforth limited to only the headstones. Later on, we had to make an additional rule of no hiding in the woods, which bordered the north, south, and west sides. Our hide and seek sessions were usually limited to either failing to find one or more of the hiders or lunch or supper time whichever came first.

 

Of course, not all of our cemetery capers were as innocuous as hide and seek. Every Halloween night, we would sneak into the cemetery and tip over the cemetery outhouse. After a few years of doing this every year, one Halloween night we went back to execute our yearly outhouse tipping over ritual and found that it was gone. I guess pushing it over the high cliff the year before no doubt convinced the township trustees that they could manage without it. This wouldn't have presented any problems for the township cemetery maintenance man since there were plenty of trees in the surrounding woods. Now that I think about it, as the outhouse was tumbling down the side of the cliff, it did break into a whole lot of pieces.

 

Tom's sister, Jane would often paint the fingernails of a statue with red fingernail polish. When I was shooting pictures of the cemetery including the statue, I should have painted it with red fingernail polish just for old times sake since Jane now lives in Lorain, I think. On the other hand, since there's no finger nail polish around the house, I'm hesitant to go out and buy any. I could check the Internet and since you can find anything on it, I don't doubt that I could even find long lasting red fingernail polish for stone statues. Well, never mind, I'm long past the mischievous stage at this point in life. (If you believe that statement, then are you ever mistaken!) I'm the guy that suggested to some of our classmates on our 40 year class reunion to paint "Class of '66 - 40 years and still going!" on the Turnpike bridge that goes over Rt 61 just south of town. Unfortunately, we never got around to it. I guess, we thought twice about doing it, because at our ages, we figured we'd have a hard time getting that high on a ladder. Even so, I still haven't gotten the idea out of my head to do it. Let's see, our 45^th class reunion is in 2011. What the heck, I may just grab aluminum ladder and actually paint it on the Turnpike bridge this time. If you see" Class of '66 - 45 years and still going!"  in May 2011, it will be I that put it there. I have nothing to loose, because if I happened to be caught, I could just plead not guilty do to temporary insanity due to Alzheimer's disease. They would buy that. In fact, they would buy it even if I didn't have Alzheimer's disease.  The only thing they would not believe is that it was due to temporary insanity J  As I always say, "Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional!"

 

Alas, about all I do in Riverside Cemetery these days is look for headstones and take pictures of them for out of town people, walk through it in the fall, and in between arthritis attacks, ride my retro balloon tire bike around the cemetery roads. If there was still an outhouse there, I may be tempted to sneak in there some dark moonless night and push it over the cliff just for old time's sake. Too bad there is still not a replacement outhouse there now. I wonder if it is because the surrounding woods are still there, or if the township trustees know that Tim and I live less than a mile from the cemetery? I wonder...