> Right away, however, I realized she was right. Cemeteries are great places to walk, especially older cemeteries. What a great place to reflect on how much the world has changed in such a short period of recent history!
>

Yes, yes they are! :) Lots of people tend to get supersticiously freaked out, though, or they just plain don't get it.

A few weeks ago, when some of my friends and I took a trip to Monterey, our hotel room was right next to a cemetery. You could literally walk out 20 feet from our patio door and be among the headstones. We went out for a walk there in the late afternoon, and although two of my friends found it too creepy for their liking, another of my friends and I found it really interesting. The cemetery was rather pretty... lots of old Monterey cypress trees (Monterey cypress look different from common cypress), the smell and sound of the sea, and small groups of deer moving about. Add to that the view of the Monterey lighthouse, and it's really cool.

We ended up in the old section of the cemetery. The newer parts don't even have headstones... just identical marble flat stones set into the ground. We spent our time looking at the old, varied headstones. Some were very small... the graves of babies and very young children. There were old family plots. Some stones were covered in scripture. And I surprised myself by realizing that it's not spooky... it's a place for reverent silence, yes, but it's also a place to reflect on history, like you said.

Oh, and my dad's side of the family does a lot of geneology, too... I remember one time when we were in Massachusetts (his family is from that area; in fact, my several times great grandfather was the captain of the whaleboat Greyhound, out of New Bedford, Mass.) we walked through the most mosquito infested forest EVER to find some old gravestones. That was... interesting. :) (We did find them.)

Sosi"zombies, schombies..."qui