I spent Saturday morning at a CDP meetup at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Founded in 1860, Graceland is one of those places that we in the Midwest think of as incredibly old, but if it was located in London the locals wouldn’t have noticed it yet. The surnames on the graves can be matched to virtually every landmark and street in the city, with the possible exception of 63rd. The cemetery serves as something of a macabre tourist destination, to the point of handing out celebrity maps to those who’d like to pay their long-overdue respects to historic figures such as George Pullman, Louis Sullivan, and Marshall Field.
Given the unlikelihood of scoring an autograph from one of the aforementioned dignitaries, I decided to skip the tourist map and meander alone across the cemetery grounds. October is the best time of year to be poking around by yourself in an aging cemetery, and the mood would have been absolutely perfect had the sun not come a-shinin’ through about 20 minutes after I started walking.
I had been given a lead on a particularly creepy-looking shrouded statue not too far from the entrance, and that’s what I was seeking before the sun turned everything into Happy Contrast City. By the time I found the monument, it had been transformed from ghoulish nightmare to something that might be sold in miniature with a thermometer glued to its back in the Magic Kingdom.
After about 10 minutes of body gyrations that failed to coax an itinerant cloud into a position between me and the sun, I gave up and moved on. I decided to try to make the contrast work for me, so I started focusing on interesting bits of masonry and architectural wonders.
The great thing about being me is that I’m always finding something fascinating to stop and look at. It’s not really ADD–I just hate to miss anything that might be gone next time I come back. This particular personality quirk does little for physical fitness and tends to drive my friends crazy in museums, but it also means that I didn’t have to move more than about 10 feet at any given time to find something I wanted to photograph.
So over the next three hours or so, I shot a lot of pictures. I shot headstones and towers, mausoleums and goofy things that looked like stone tree stumps. Washington Monument-looking things, iron gates, and crumbling sections of brick. I climbed hills, laid down on the ground, and aimed my camera into the sky. And when it finally got late and I had to go, and the other meetup geeks were passing me on their way to gather for lunch, I was still probably no more than 800 feet inside the front gate.
I guess I’m going to have to go back there sometime.