Beginning in a Cemetery

My first job was digging graves and cutting grass for the city cemetery department. All four years of my High School I spent those hot summer days either behind a lawn mower weaving my way through tomb-stones or at the end of a shovel whose blade had to toss dirt from the bottom of a newly dug grave where we had to "square it out." It was not glorious work but it paid good, $1.25 an hour...and I got a great tan.

I meet some interesting folks in the cemetery; no not the dead ones, the other ones. There was Junior who drove the truck that would dump us young ones at the cemetery. Junior's front two teeth were left in a grave somewhere. He liked to sing while he worked...you know whistling through the cemetery and all that.

Then there was Dillon who operated the back-hoe that did most of the heavy work when it came to digging the graves. The "summer help" had to jump down in the grave after Dillon did his digging in order to tidy things up so that the vault would be level. After all you don't want the new tenet to "sleep away their days" in an uneven manner.

And there was Joe, who was our "supervisor." Joe never did much expect boss us around and try to convince us all of how smart he was. I used to think, "If you are so smart what the heck are you doing in a cemetery...all the time?" Anyway, Joe loved to tell us of his exploits with women. If half of them were true he should have always been a very tired man.

Joe knew how naive I was. He liked to use that. "Want to taste this," he once asked as he offered me a jar of crystal clear liquid. I knew he ran moonshine on the side and I did not want Junior and Dillon to think I was a wimp so I leaned my head back and took a swallow. I discovered why it is appropriately named "White Lightning" because I still have a streak of that stuff running around in my system somewhere. I've tasted other "alcohol products" I must admit but never anything like that.

So as you can see I had my beginnings in a cemetery where some of my "real" education took place. It can be awfully peaceful in a cemetery when you are left there all alone with a lawnmower and told that you would be picked up at 4:30. This was before the days of I-Pods and headphones so I had to make my own music. There was a lot of time to ponder while I soaked up the rays that would end up giving me that golden tan that drove the girls wild. (See Joe did have an affect on me.)

Seems that later I ended up getting some other education and in fact found myself doing something professionally because of something that happened in a cemetery. No, I'm not a gravedigger but I do offer news about something whose origins begin with an empty grave. The story I get to share has its own cast of characters who are as "colorful" as Dillon, Junior, and Joe. It seems that as one child so aptly put it when told just who Jesus chose for his disciples, "He sure was not a very good judge of character."

So the story may seem to end in a cemetery but in fact begins there...and...yes the story is full of characters. I smile now as I think about the truth that I may have "started" by filling up graves and I'm going to end by proclaiming the unbelievable news that those same graves will end up "empty" of what really matters. It all began in a cemetery.

Bless you,
jody jseymour@davidsonumc.org