By Christopher Zoukis
Image courtesy youtube.com
There’s a dark green bench near the tombstone, one of the old ones with the wooden slats and iron legs, like the ones city governments placed at bus stops. It’s as if he’s inviting you stay for a while. Sit, relax and let us converse.
His name is on the back of the bench, along with his birth date and his death date. Of course that got me to thinking that maybe the bench isn’t for sitting and relaxing. Maybe it’s part of the tombstone, kind of a double display effect: the actual stone tombstone and the bench forming two sides, like bookends for the dead.
The actual tombstone has his name and dates too. Two feet wide by eight inches high, it’s a three-layered affair, like a cake, but each layer is smaller than the one beneath it. The bottom layer is just cement, with the next two higher layers being black granite, which, as usual, isn’t really black. More of a dark gray.