I’ve never met Jaimie Vernon but we’re friends. We’re the kind of friends that didn’t even exist a dozen years ago. Yes, we’re Facebook friends. It’s because of music. Vernon runs Bullseye Records which represented the band Klaatu through part of their career. I’m a Klaatu fan and stumbled onto a related online group in which Vernon played an active role. The e-group eventually became more or less dormant but we remained e-friends in the Facebook world. I’m sharing this, not because it has anything to do with the contents of this book, but to explain how I even know of the book’s existence. I am not in the habit of chasing down either cop books or cemetery stories.
For most, I imagine the phrase “cemetery stories” is associated with tales of hauntings and the supernatural. The tales in True Tales from a Cemetery Cop are not those. I knew that going in. I’d read the earliest versions of a few of them on Vernon’s Facebook page when, still freshly amused or appalled, he related them initially. While some of the behavior documented in this book might not seem exactly natural to everyone, it is decidedly not supernatural.
Even though Vernon has written other books, including the two volume
Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia, this was the first time I’d read anything of his beyond a few liner notes and those Facebook postings. I was happy to discover that he is a very competent writer and often a thoughtful one as well.
The book comes from Vernon’s one year stint as a security guard at Toronto’s largest cemeteries. It was a job he took to keep his family afloat through some rough times. Like many jobs of this sort, guarding cemeteries has plenty of short periods of hyperactivity separated by long periods of no activity at all. Being alone with your thoughts is something that most guards, patrolmen, and motel clerks experience but the thoughts that come while waiting for the next speeder or call for more towels are not the same as those that come in the middle of the night in the midst of thousands of people not one of which is living. Vernon shares some of these thoughts without being overly spooky or preachy.
But the “true tales” promised in the title come not from his time alone or non-existent interaction with the dead but from his interaction with the living. Sometimes it’s with living critters like raccoons who call the cemetery home but more often it is with living human visitors. The human residents present no problems at all. There are some funny incidents and some incredibly sad ones and some that are simply frustrating. Along with those lonely night reflections, the tales provide a glimpse at a job we all know must exist but which we have probably never even thought about.
Vernon’s writing is enjoyable and easy to read. He provides all the details necessary without being burdensome. He avoids specifics that could embarrass anyone although I found myself hoping some of the players were embarrassed at the very least. The book is self published and there are some “typos” that might not make it to print with a full publishing house team involved. With today’s spell checking technology misspelled words rarely get through but they do sometimes get turned into the wrong word. That has happened here in a few cases. An example is the word ‘undo’ appearing rather than ‘undue’. The rest are of the same caliber. They never prevent understanding but they might cause some readers to pause.
I won’t claim that the book made me cry or laugh but the job had Vernon doing both along with shaking his head at what some of the living consider appropriate behavior around the dead. As I was reading the last part of this book, publication of a second volume was announced. It’s on my list.
Signed copies are available directly from the author at CemeteryCop.com
True Tales from a Cemetery Cop: To Serve and Protect the Dead, Jaimie Vernon, Bullseye Publishing/CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (September 18, 2016), 9 x 6 inches, 160 pages, ISBN 978-1537138022
Available through Amazon.
DeLorme Street Atlas is one of my oldest tools. I started using it in 2001. I’ve talked about it in a few posts but was surprised to see that it has never been the primary focus of a post. The reason, I suppose, is the old story of taking something for granted until you lose it. The first version I used was 9.0. There were a few more numbered revisions and a misstep into a Road Warrior version before the numeric year was used in the product name and a string of annual releases began. I didn’t grab every one. I more or less fell into biennial mode and upgraded just every other year. 2016 was to be my next planned update but plans changed. In early 2016 Garmin closed a deal to acquire DeLorme and all Street Atlas development was stopped. 2015 was the final version produced. This first post with DeLorme in the title will also be the last.
It’s exactly what you’d expect. That’s not to say that there is no new information and no surprises but the sometimes almost poetic writing style is exactly what I expected from a man who has produced some of the most notable English language lyrics of the last four decades. It’s no secret that some of those lyrics were just a bit autobiographical so it’s possible to think of this as sort of a much longer and more detailed version of the story he’s been singing since he first greeted us from Asbury Park.
A few days later I was in San Diego 
I’ve sometimes said that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the scariest time of my life and that’s true in the sense that there was a very real possibility that the world would be completely destroyed before Walter Cronkite even had time to announce it. But in other ways, the fear that followed Kennedy’s assassination was probably worse. Until it was proven otherwise, it was natural to assume that it was the work of our Cold War adversaries. Flying a silver ball over our cornfields was intimidating and pointing loaded rockets our way was a clear threat but eliminating our leader was the real thing. If the USSR had a hand in the assassination then the Cold War wasn’t very cold anymore. What would be our response? What would be their next step?
1968 was the first election I was old enough to participate in and there are indeed some similarities between it and the one just past. Then many wanted McCarthy or McGovern but got Humphrey. This year many wanted Sanders but got Clinton. Humphrey and Clinton both lost and maybe for some of the same reasons. I suspect it’s a much older joke but I first heard it applied to the 1968 victor. “If Nixon ran unopposed he’d have lost.” It’s possible the same thing could be said this year regardless of whether it was Trump of Clinton who came out on top. I believe I heard just as many people proclaim who they were voting against as who they were voting for. The convention that nominated Humphrey was preceded by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and accompanied by police violence directed at protesters. The latter was, to me, the most frightening occurrence of a very frightening year. Things aren’t the same today but they’re not entirely different either.
Unfortunately I’ve found no photos of my 1970 Chevelle. Fortunately the internet is absolutely filled with photos of 1970 Chevelles. Unfortunately not many of those look very much like mine. The era of the Chevelle and the era of the muscle car are pretty much one and the same. As I’ll demonstrate shortly, non-muscular Chevelles existed but it’s tire smokers like the big block Super Sport at right (
My Chevelle looked more like a composite of the two at left (also snatched from the internet) than the one at top. It was a blue 2-door hardtop but without the vinyl top. I think it had full wheel covers like the green car but I admit I’m less than certain. Like the Chevy II before it, the Chevelle had spent its life outside in an apartment complex parking lot and was seriously dinged and dinghy. It was not a rusty wreck, however, and was mechanically sound. With its 307 V8 and automatic transmission, it was neither as economical or as fun to drive as the Audi but it wasn’t bad. I suspect new shocks would have helped considerably.
Friday’s date was eleven eleven. I spent the day at the 2016 Los Angeles Route 66 Festival where the ninetieth anniversary of Route 66 was celebrated. November 11, 1926, was when the United States Numbered Highway System was officially approved so US 66 did indeed come into being on that date but so did another 188 routes. I’ve always thought the big deal some folks make of Sixty-Six’s “birthday” to be somewhere between silly and chauvinistic. Sort of like New Hampshire celebrating its independence — and only its own independence — on the Fourth of July.
But November 11 was an actual national holiday well ahead of the creation of the United States Numbered Highway System and it marked something more meaningful than identifying one nation’s roads. When I started to school in 1953, November 11 was known as Armistice Day. During the next year, the name was officially changed to Veterans Day although people around me didn’t start using the new name immediately. Nor did they immediately embrace the new definition. Armistice Day marked the anniversary of the end of The Great War on November 11, 1918. It began in England but soon spread to virtually all the allied nations. Two minutes of silence — one minute to remember the 20 million who died in the war and a second minute to remember those left behind — at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was an important part of the day. Things started changing when the world had another “great war” and had to start numbering them. England and many other nations changed the name to Remembrance Day to include those lost in both conflicts and, as I mentioned, the United States changed the name to Veterans Day. This may be when we began observing a single minute of silence on the day or maybe it was always that way in the US. We observed one minute of silence at the festival.
We fought a war to get this country going then gave every land owning white male above the age of twenty-one the right to vote. A little more than four score years later, we fought a war with ourselves that cleared the way for non-whites to vote. Several decades of loud, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous behavior brought the granting of that same right to non-males a half-century later and another half century saw the voting age lowered to eighteen after a decade or so of protests and demonstrations.
Of course, putting something in a constitution does not automatically make it a practice throughout the land and I am painfully aware that resistance followed each of those changes and that efforts to make voting extremely difficult for “the other side” are ongoing today. I don’t want to ignore partisan obstructions and system flaws but neither do I want to get hung up on them. I meant my first paragraph to be a reminder that a hell of a lot of effort, property, and lives have gone into providing an opportunity to vote to a hell of a lot of people. Far too many of those opportunities go unused.
In the title I claim to not care how anyone votes. That’s not entirely true, of course. I have my favorite candidates and issues. I’ll be disappointed in anyone who votes differently than I do but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be in anyone who doesn’t vote at all. I’m reminded of parents working on getting their kids to clean their plates with lines like, “There are hungry children in China who would love to have your green beans.” I’m not sure what the demand for leftover beans is in Beijing these days but I’m pretty sure some folks there would like to have our access to ballots and voting booths.