Caustic Cupcake's Creepy Cupboard

CUPCAKE: You are so cute. How are you so cute all the time?
LOPRO: I'm from Cutopia!
CUPCAKE: Cutopia?! Awwwww! That's the cutest thing I've ever heard! What town in Cutopia?
LOPRO: (accusatorily) Don't ask me to think of other things. ...Burg.

This morning, just before the crack of dawn, a phone call jolted me and Logic Professor out of our comfortable sleep. It was his father; LoPro was worried that something had happened, but it turns out that his dad just wanted to let him know not to get up for school. The college where Logic Professor teaches on Wednesdays was opening late due to inclement weather.

Inclement weather, where I come from, is kind of relative. We get snow every year. It's enough that we stock up on rock salt and learn about driving on ice in driver's ed class, but not enough that we consider it a normal part of the scenery. But why not? Brief though it usually is, it is not unexpected. Somehow, though, we get all up in arms the first time it starts to flurry. Living in the Northeast, we can predict that at some point between December and March we'll have to shovel the driveway. I mean, winter is the time for snow. If you live in the Northeast. Which we do. Still, as soon as an inch or two piles up, people start stocking up on milk and sliding off the road, sometimes in the same outing. I have not personally driven off the road while hoarding staple foods for the coming blizzard, but I enjoy grossly overreacting from the moment the first flake touches down, and look forward to someday skidding into a curb while clutching seven loaves of Wonder Bread.

After Logic Professor hung up the phone, we got up and went to the window. It looked snowy, to be sure, but not undriveable, at least not for people who live somewhere where snow happens every year. Which, as I said, we do. But if the schools wanted to close, I was not going to complain. With much anticipation, I checked my school email for news of a closing.

Nothing. So I checked our website. Open for business, it said. "You motherfuckers," I said out loud.
"They're open?" Logic Professor exclaimed.

We went back to bed for 45 minutes until my alarm went off, and by then I didn't want to get out of bed. It was snowy and cold, and by god I would not be cheated out of a snow day. My helpful and suspiciously wakeful boyfriend pulled the covers off the bed and took the big puffy armload of flannel and down with him to the kitchen to make tea, followed by a string of epithets. The idea was that being blanketless would encourage me to get up, but Logic Professor underestimated the degree to which contrarianism motivates my every action. He returned a few minutes later to find me huddled under a little fleece throw I'd snatched from the couch. "You dirty little sneak," he said, holding out the hot cup of tea.

Eventually I decided to suck it up and get ready for school, though not without bitching. Seriously: the climate outside was such that the atmosphere was solidifying, shattering, and plummeting to the ground in little shards. How could I learn under those conditions?

Then again, I'd prepared for class ahead of time, reading Dryden and Swift on Monday, and reading the assorted Poe stories a few semesters ago. (Ah, the blessed curriculum overlap enjoyed by transfer students; one man's American Lit is another man's American Short Fiction.) Armed with a sandwich, a thermos of tea, and a notebook, I bundled up and set off for school.

I returned ten minutes later. While it wasn't that snowy, it sure was icy. After cracking the car door open, I rolled down the windows and, from the inside, knocked out the sheer panes of ice that remained, then rolled the windows back up. With the defroster on full blast, I started scraping the ice off the windshield, and then thought, What are you doing? I had already been advised by one professor that, should things get inclement on Wednesday, she would not expect us to charter dogsleds to make it to class. Another professor had emailed us to ask who would be staying home due to the weather. I interpreted that as her blessing to quit hacking at the ice-coat with an empty CD case (I do have a scraper, but it has disappeared) (so I guess I don't have a scraper).

I snapped off a corner of the car-shaped ice form to show LoPro, and on my way through the garden, I peeled off a couple of these to show him as well:


It was on a rhododendron leaf. "Can we save it?" he asked.
"I... guess," I said, and put the leaf in the freezer. If I'd thought of saving them, I would have collected more.

He was excited that I was coming back to sleep, but I declined. As long as I'm awake and trying to combat truant's guilt, I might as well do something useful.

This is what Parsley is doing with his snow day:

On November 9th, I sent Logic Professor this email:

From: Cupcake
To: Logic Professor
Re: pygmy hippo video

Get me a pygmy hippo.

The email also included a link to this video. Go ahead and watch it. I especially like when the little hippo goes underwater, then comes back up and shakes the water off its ears.



Making demands in a relationship - especially unreasonable or unfeasible ones - is not my style. However, look at it:



Seriously. I would have given a kidney to have a baby pygmy hippo. Thankfully, no kidney extraction is necessary, because one of these was waiting for my under the Christmas tree:


That is a porcelain baby pygmy hippo from Lenox. I named her Hester, and she sits on our headboard.

I still can't believe that man got me a fucking baby pygmy hippo.

God damn it! I just did my eye makeup, and I have to leave for the first day of school, and the inauguration is on, and every time I see Michelle and the girls I start to cry.

Look, I've been busy. There are a lot of things I've wanted to blog about:

• The porcelain baby pygmy hippo I got for Christmas.


• The Cool Punk Rock Bar's cool punk rock Christmas party, in which everyone got drunk, several people wound up on a stripper pole, and I had a caesar salad so magnificent that I have invested over $40 to replicate it. ("Congratulations," said Logic Professor. "You just spent forty dollars to make a fifteen dollar salad.")


• The quilt I made for my parents for Christmas. No, really. It's huge and puffy and blue, and the many hours I spent stitching my fingers to the bone to have it ready in time for Christmas prevented me from blogging for most of December. But I couldn't tell you that. It was a surprise. It's not quite done.


• My grades. I GOT STRAIGHT A's!


• New Year's Eve, and the angriest I've ever been at Logic Professor. It's better now.


• The wedding we attended down south, and the surreal experience of being alone in the catering hall arranging flowers while the caterer asked questions I couldn't answer because HELLO? If I were important enough to know what order the wedding party would arrive in, I wouldn't be stuck here with you and the flowers.


• How I set Officer Dude straight.


• The crazy birthday party of the Owner's girlfriend, in which everyone got drunk again, and I wound up taking the limo back to the bar by myself.


• My date with Logic Professor, in which we stole a pint glass from the Big F'ing Nightclub where I used to cocktail waitress, saw Gran Torino, and set out on an epic quest for creme brulee that ended in an upscale Cuban restaurant in another state.


• The utter eradication of my circadian rhythms. If you are reading this from the Southern Hemisphere, I beg you to send me a picture of sunshine.


• DNA testing. I sent the vial of spit back to the lab today, and in a few weeks I should have the results. Mom, if there's anything you'd like to tell Dad, now might be the time to do it.*


• My second semester at the University, which starts in fifteen hours.

But the more I have to blog about, the less likely I am to have the time to do it.

Who wants to hear about what?


* Knowing my father, that sentence elicited little or no response. However, in the off chance that it did, I was kidding.

Continued from Part One.

It started out as a joke.

There had been some trouble outside the bar involving a friend, and it looked like he could be arrested. I obtained the officer's phone number and called him. We hadn't formally met, but in the year and a half I've been working at the bar, I've been vaguely aware of his presence. He was the cop who'd been upstairs playing pool last Halloween when he was summoned downstairs by a report of someone with a knife. His name has come up in conversations, because as a bike cop, he knows and is friendly with everyone on our street. Officer Dude is known as an advocate of the bartenders who take care of him, and the person to call when another cop is trying to stuff you into the back of a patrol car. He was the cop who prevented another bartender from going to jail when she'd had a few drinks and tried to peel out around the corner in front of the bar and hit a dumpster. When I called him, I assumed that he either knew I existed or would pretend that he did. I was right, but still don't know which is was.

So with the nervous, distraught friend waiting, I called Officer Dude and said "This is Cupcake from the CPRB, and there's a problem outside that I was hoping you could help us with..." OD came and sorted it out, and the friend claimed to be forever in my debt. "Yeah," I said, "You're not the one who has to give Officer Dude head for this."

Officer Dude had left at this point, but bouncers listen, and bouncers can talk.

That's why a few weeks later Officer Dude was shining his police-grade criminal-blinding flashlight in the window of the bar at me, and the bouncer who'd overheard the comment was saying "Officer Dude is here to cash in, Cupcake!"
"Oh, Jesus Christ," I said.

He sent a bouncer in with the note. It was written on the back of a ticket:

I ONLY RECEIVE AFTER I GIVE!!
I LOVE TO GIVE!!!
It included his phone number. I thought it was hilarious and showed everyone at the bar. "He thought I was serious?" I asked the Cool Manager.
"Nah, he's just fucking with you," he said.

Last night someone walked out front with a beer. Rather than arrest my customer, Officer Dude told him to get his ass back in the bar. Then he stuck his head in.
"That's two," he said. The joke had kind of lost its luster, though.
"I'm going to have to declare blowjob bankruptcy," I told the people I was working with, laughing.

It got weird when he came in to talk to me. I deflected every reference he made to oral sex, and offered him a soda. He declined.
"It's bad advertisement to have the cops in here," I said. He told me to text him.

I should have just blurted out "I HAVE A BOYFRIEND," but there were a few problems with that. One, it would almost certainly draw the response "Whoa, whoa, I was just kidding with you. Can't you take a joke?" He hadn't said anything explicit enough, or serious enough, that he couldn't retract by claiming he had been joking, even though it was clear that the joke had a rock-hard nugget of truth in it. Second, I wanted to keep him on my side. Embarrassing him or acting cold after he'd done me a favor would be fantastic jeopardize my chances of being able to call for help again. Still, there was no way I would pretend to like him just to have my own personal one-man police force. I resolved to mention my boyfriend casually, in passing, so it wouldn't appear that I was deliberately throwing it in his face. This way, he could deduce from my casual mention of a boyfriend that I had been joking and had assumed all along that he'd known I was joking, thus giving him an easy out. In any event, he had been pretending this whole time that he knew who I was; if I mentioned a boyfriend as if he had known about Logic Professor this whole time, he would probably continue the charade.

So I texted him conversationally. How was work, I asked. Slow and cold, he responded, but could he see me before I went home? Oh dear god. He was making a casual boyfriend reference impossible. Any such reference would, at this point, be abrupt. I held out for a better opportunity, and did not text back. I'd run into him at some point, I figured.

After work, I was walking across my lawn, going upstairs to the waiting arms of my sleeping boyfriend, when Officer Dude called me. I answered, intending to drop the boyfriend reference. "Well, I just got home to my boyfriend, so I'd better go," I would say.

But as I turned the key and walked into my kitchen, it occurred to me that this could be taken another way. What if he interpreted it as "Not while my boyfriend is within earshot, but we'll continue this later"? How the fuck would I undo THAT?
"I have to go," was all I said.
"Come on! Don't get off the phone! We've only been talking for a minute," he insisted, annoyingly. I KNOW, I thought, AND IT'S BEEN FIVE MINUTES TOO LONG. So I hung up on him.
"I just got home and I'm tired. Talk to you later," I said, and hung up immediately without addressing his stupid, stupid argument.

Oh dear.

Last night an adorable gay boy kissed me, I built a house of coasters on the bar that wound up taller than me, an on-duty cop offered to give me head, I licked a three-foot inflatable penis, someone texted me to ask if I would direct them to the nearest coke dealer, a friendly bartender from the local lesbian club gave me her number, and Twin 2 showed me his new tattoos. It was a normal night and I had a good time. Now, having polished off the last of the croutons, I'm sitting around under a blanket with my laptop, a rapidly diminishing cup of tea, and a plate full of apple slices and parmesan slivers as my laundry dries in the kitchen. Logic Professor is watching football and doing laundry at his parents' house.

Friday night was when I started building coaster houses. It was unusually slow for a Friday, and the customers and I stayed entertained by leaning little square cardboard coasters against each other, stacking them up gradually to see who could make the biggest coaster castle. They could have known that because I am always sober, I will always win, but that wasn't the point.

The highlight of my house-of-coasters experience on Friday was when a heavily tattooed young thug said, "In a movie, this is where someone would come up and knock down the whole thing, and a brawl would start, and it would be funny. But in real life, that would be bad." Then I took a swing at the coasters, sending them flying across the bar. His girlfriend, a few bystanders and I had to laugh at him, because the look on his face when the coasters went flying was priceless. "YOU SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME," he yelled.
"I wasn't serious!" I laughed. It was worth it to have to pick up all the coasters.

I continued my coaster constructions last night, but Twin 1 pointed out a flaw in my endeavor. "It was fine when it was small," he said, "but you reach a point where the bigger it is, the crazier you look." I believe he was right, and thus ended my construction with coasters.



The good news is that I had plenty of other distractions to entertain me, like the bachelorette party that blew through the bar carrying all manner of penis paraphernalia. To me, the enthusiasm at bachelorette parties often seems forced, the debauchery feels contrived, and the point seems self-contradictory: the lady of honor is celebrating her last night of freedom, but because she's getting married she can't actually do anything crazy. I got beads without showing my breasts to anyone, and I got to hold - and lick, for the purpose of photographs - a gigantic inflatable penis that was disconcertingly wet, possibly due to a beer spill. Nobody, I assume, touched any real penises.

While the bachelorettes were doing their bachelorette thing, I consoled a gay boy who was hanging out with a straight friend. "You are so hot," he said to me, by way of introduction. "I mean, you are SO. HOT."
"Thanks," I said. It might seem callous, but ignoring drunken flattery is necessary to being an efficient bartender when it's busy. He gestured for me to come closer, and leaned over the bar.
"Dear, I'm gay," he said.
"OH!" I said. He laughed.
"But you are still so hot," he reiterated.
"That is a way better compliment now!" I said. "Thank you!"
He was having the same problem as the bachelorettes, re: touching penises.
"He's straight," he complained while his friend was in the bathroom. "It is so hard to find someone."
"This isn't the place for it," I said.
"I know, but I don't want to go to the gayborhood," he replied. We chatted for a while, and he gave me a kiss on the cheek before they left.

At some point I got a text message asking if I would help out with something I might find morally objectionable. "Sure, what?" I wrote back. It turns out that they needed coke, and by extension, a coke dealer. They thought that I might be able to introduce them to someone. I looked up from my phone, and waved to a coke dealer who had just come in and was chatting with a bouncer. "Nobody reliable," I deflected in my reply. What about someone semi-reliable? they wanted to know. Well, I'm acquainted with enough of them at this point that statistically, their respective levels of reliability must be normally distributed with a smattering at the high end, a majority in the semi-reliable range, and a handful I wouldn't trust to take the dog for a walk without crushing it up and snorting it. However, I have no data on their business practices. Furthermore, they know the managers, and the owner, and everybody talks to everybody else. And to top everything else off, one of them recently stuck a gun in my barback's face; the smattering at the low end of reliable is a small contingent with significant implications. I tried to think of how I could arrange this with a minimal risk to my job and the safety of the friend who was asking. "I don't want to shit where I eat," I wrote back.

Everything I know about the drug scene is necessarily tied to my work situation. All of my "coolness" in that area has been inflicted on me.

Speaking of someone fucking with their work situation, there's a cop on our street who has put me in an awkward position. Namely, he would like to... um... yeah. It started with an offhand, joking comment that I made a few weeks ago.

To be continued in Part Two.

If it's wrong to sit around in my pajamas all day researching long-dead distant relatives on Ancestry.com, take a nap, eat a box of croutons for lunch, resume looking up dead relatives, and only get dressed with fifteen minutes until I have to leave for work... then I don't want to be right.

Tonight my goal is to have fun. I've been getting lazy and jaded at work, and if I can't have fun bartending, then I might not be capable of having fun ever.

I can't believe I ate almost an entire box of croutons.

I'd better go put on some pants.

Today Logic Professor took me to IKEA so I could show him some end tables I was looking at. He did not like any of them, but I can wait. "$119?! This is a thirty-dollar table!" he exclaimed, and before I could even explain how you have to pay for brilliant Scandinavian simplicity I realized how stupid it was going to sound: "Yes, what you see there is thirty dollars, but it's what you don't see that costs the extra $89."

Instead, I got a CD tower, some candles, a little black glass lamp to match the little pink glass lamp and little white glass lamp that I bought the other day (pictures coming soon of my new lamp trifecta), flexible plastic anti-Parsley tubes to protect our printer cables, and three tiny cacti. I let Logic Professor select the cacti. It was at the end of our shopping trip, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was being That Girl, the one dragging her boyfriend around a home furnishing store and asking his opinion only when she needs a little extra justification to buy something ("But no. Really. Do we need this candle holder? No? But would it look good on the shelf in the kitchen?"*), not because she's actually letting him help furnish the home. "You pick out the cactuses," I offered, but he didn't have much choice because they came in three-packs. So he got to pick the pack of cactus. And then we were at the end of our shopping trip.

Then we went to Acme and got some anchovy paste, croutons, and a lemon, and I made caesar salad from scratch. IT WAS DELICIOUS.

Now I'm going to work. That was my day.



* The answer? "I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR FIVE-DOLLAR CANDLE HOLDER." But he would never say that.

It was one of the most enjoyable and satisfying conversations I've had with another person. This afternoon, a few minutes before his office closed, I called an archaeologist in charge of grave preservation down south somewhere.

A few days ago, my boyfriend and I had been driving northwards after a clusterfuck of a wedding many hours from home when I saw a tiny graveyard. Everything about it was, to me, unusual; there were only three or four tombstones, they were not fenced off, and it was in front yard. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not used to fetching the morning paper off of a grave blanket.

"There's another one of those tiny graveyards," I said to Logic Professor. On the way down, we'd passed enough of them that on the return trip my face was practically pressed to the glass. Going to the wedding, we'd gotten lost taken a different route, however, and now, on our return trip, we were passing them even more frequently. One stone. Five stones. Ten stones. Two stones. Some fenced in, some not, some better maintained than others, some out in the middle of fields, and most of them within a stone's throw of a house. I could have chalked one or two of them up to historical sites, but now we had passed enough that I had to find out.

I wanted to pull over and look, and certainly would have if I had been alone, but we were following two other cars. Besides, as I later mentioned to my new pal, Mr. Archaeologist, it was bad enough for my boyfriend that most girlfriends would say "Look at the pretty landscape!" and his says "Look at that cemetery!" I didn't want to make the man pull over and go stomping across a tobacco field to get to a gravestone.

Actually, yes I did. I just didn't want his friends in the other two cars to see me.

When it got too dark to continue looking, I was still five or six hours from home. I texted my sister and asked her to Google something for me. She agreed. I explained the situation. "Dozens of them," I texted. "What's the deal?" But because she sucks, she did not follow through, and I chided her today as we chatted:

Cupcake: So: here's the deal.
I told you to Google the tiny graveyard thing, remember?
?
Jul: And I didn't, because I suck.
Cupcake: Clearly. And now I'M the one with the invitation to go look at graves.
Ha!
Jul: You also have an invitation to BITE MY ASS.

Thus, I had to wait until I got home to look it up. About half past midnight, I finally had the chance to Google "small graveyards" in the state we'd traveled through.

No luck. Family graveyards? Small cemeteries? Family plots? Small graveyard preservation? Eventually, I happened upon the state archaeologist's office, and I sent them an email:

Hi,

I was in [your state] this weekend for a wedding, and driving back to [my state], I noticed dozens of tiny cemeteries in people's yards! Most had between one and ten gravestones. They looked very well maintained, and some were in front of what looked like fairly new houses. I've never seen anything like this in [my lame, grave-clumping, death-denying, tombstone-hiding state]! Are these old family plots from many years ago, or do residents still have the right to be buried in their own front yard? Is this the most popular way to be buried in [your über-neat state], or did the practice end many years ago?

Thanks for helping out a curious tourist!

- Cupcake

Meanwhile, back at the archaeologist's office, my email was directed to the man with the shovel, so to speak. There are archaeologists who preserve shipwrecks, farmhouses, battlefields, and national treasures. This one gets called when someone's lawnmower kicks up a skull. He emailed me back the next day, telling me to give him a call during his office hours.

I waited until the time came, then waited a little more. Would it be creepy if I called at precisely the time he'd given me? Intrigued as I might have been, I was still afraid to call too early. I went to reheat some pad thai, then lost track of time and wound up throwing down the bowl of noodles and running to get my phone with ten minutes left before his office closed. Now I was afraid I'd be calling too late. It turns out that I had nothing to worry about on either front: this was the one person who would not be put off by my enthusiasm, and who would wind up staying on the phone with me for forty minutes. As you could have guessed, he seemed more than happy to have someone to talk about graves with.

Imagine, if you will, that you buy a new house. You're in your backyard, putting in a bed of flowers, enjoying the sunshine, when all of a sudden you start turning over human bones. You scream, drop the petunias, and frantically dial 9-1-1. The cops arrive minutes later. They cordon off your yard, question you, and after determining that this is not a "recent kill" (as Mr. Archaeologist referred to it), they turn the case over to the FBI. The FBI arrive, figure out (possibly to their disappointment) that the bones have been there for a couple hundred years, and that's when Mr. Archaeologist's phone rings. "I work closely with the FBI and the local medical examiners," he said.

For a long time, his department did not exist. But the archaeologist's office kept getting phone calls from people who didn't know who else to call with their questions. Combined with increased development encroaching on rural graveyards, and what he calls "the growing popularity of cemeteries" - no, not the growing population of cemeteries, the growing popularity of cemeteries - it was only a matter of time before provisions had to be made. He had already been taking care of things for thirty years. Now it's official. There are two people in his department. Well, two living ones.

Work has been quite busy since the inception of the department earlier this year. He told me all about it.

If you look at the population between, say, 1860 and 1880, and then count the number of known gravestones from that time period, there is a grave discrepancy (pun fully intended). Only a fraction of the people who lived then are accounted for by tombstones. Where are all the bodies?

A good portion of my last few trips out to Ohio has been spent hunting for the gravestones of one branch of the family with an unusual last name. Of Henry and Jane's twelve children, only four outlived their parents. Their parents lived and died in one place. Where are all the tombstones? Why have I only found one of them? Yeah, Mr. Archaeologist: where ARE all the bodies?

"The answer is out in the woods," he explained. That's where he spends a lot of his time. He might get a call from someone who has found a neat row of boxwood plants next to a neat row of person-sized depressions in the middle of the woods, and then it's off to determine if this is an unmarked graveyard in need of preservation. Or a developer will be knocking down some trees to make room for housing and will find, in the undergrowth, a handful of crumbling tombstones. Then Mr. Archaeologist gets called out. Often, though, a developer will keep on bulldozing and pretend that they saw nothing. To acknowledge a gravesite means complications, delays, and possibly a loss of investment. However, he urged me not to think of all developers as evil.

You can try to find out how old a grave is, and try to discover who owned the land when the bodies went into the ground, and try to see if there are any relatives. You can try to restore gravestones that are almost unreadable, and you can try to fight off developers long enough to preserve what might represent a vital part of history. You can fight for the rights of long-lost relatives who want access to private property where their ancestors are buried. You can search for clues and hints and signs in archives and evidence and gravesites, but very often, you will come up short.

So much of Mr. Archaeologist's job involves coming to terms with not having an answer. Most of the mysteries he works on will stay mysteries. "So you spend most of your time frustrated," I postulated. He laughed. "Well, no," he said. "When I was younger and had more energy it would bother me, but now I know that there are some things I'll never know." The excitement in his work comes from the variety of calls he gets, and never knowing what he'll be working on. It's not the same kind of drama you see on forensics shows, and it doesn't come with the same degree of success. "There's a very good chance that when I call you back, the answer will be 'I don't know.' And I'm okay with that."

He blames forensics shows for skewing the public's perception of what it is that he does. "They have all the answers," he said derisively. "And they figure everything out in half an hour!" But the shows serve a purpose, and it's not to actually solve problems involving bodies. "They probably make more money than I do, too," he laughed.

In real life, getting called out to look at a decomposed body in the woods isn't as glamorous as it is on television, but Mr. Archaeologist loves his job. For him, the fun part is helping out the people who call him with their myriad different questions and pleas for help ("like you," he added). "I could not make this stuff up if I tried," he said. For instance, he recently got a call from a professor at a local university. She had just one question. Back in the days when medical schools dissected cadavers that were routinely harvested from the graveyards of the poor, what did they do with the bodies when they were done? "I... don't... know," he realized. These days they are incinerated as medical waste, but back then there was a good chance that they got buried en masse in someone's yard after dark. Now he's on the lookout for a pit of people parts in or around some old universities.

In the end, the answer of the tiny graveyards has more than one answer. In the old days, Europeans established their farms in this region - near the coast, and thus one of the oldest settled areas in the country - expecting their families to remain there for good. And they brought their European burial practices with them. They lived, died, and were buried on their land, expecting that the family cemetery would always be cared for by their descendants. (In some cases, they were buried in the foundations of their houses, Mr. Archaeologist told me.) In any event, land was plentiful and farms were spaced out. There was no reason to have a central cemetery for everyone, because there was no central anything. But with the Civil War and fall of slavery, many landowners relocated without disinterring their dead. Once you plant someone and put up a stone, they don't tend to move. That small family plot from two hundred years ago is likely to be in the same place, regardless of the houses that have sprung up around it, and some homeowners have unexpectedly found themselves stewards of old cemeteries. But not all of them are strictly from colonial times. Some date right up to modern times, because in their state, you can do whatever you want with your bodies and your land. Want to bury a relative next to the hydrangeas? Nobody's going to stop you. Of course, there are regulations to ensure that your uncle doesn't end up in the water supply, but realistically nobody is going to come check.

I thanked Mr. Archaeologist for the conversation, and he thanked me back. If I'm ever down south again, the archaeology office would be glad to treat me to an iced tea. "Do you like lemon?" he asked. "Of course!" I said. I related all of this to Jul:

Cupcake: I said, "I would love to come along for the ride and see what you guys do all day!"
And he said, "That would be fantastic!"
Jul: I AM SO JEALOUS THAT MY EYES ARE OOZING BLOOD.
Man, we should start calling random people and seeing if we can tag along with them.
Cupcake: Well, I'll have to bring over my FRIEND the CEMETERY ARCHAEOLOGIST and we'll see what we can find on your blood-oozing eyes.
Ha!
Jul: Mr. Archaeologist cannot possibly be the only person with such an awesome frigging job.
Cupcake: Yeah, you know?
There must be other people with lonely jobs that nobody else is interested in.

So we've got plans in the works to pay him a visit someday, and I am still faintly glowing from the conversation. It was refreshing to talk so unabashedly about my fascination with old graveyards with someone else who shares the same fascination.

Labels: Travel