Graveyard Running and a Matter of Perspective
This morning I took a different route for the morning run. Monday I ran what I know is an almost exactly two mile track in 19:23 - not great, but I’m not racing anyone. This morning I ran what I’ll call track B. Track B runs down Market Street, where I live, hangs a right on King Street a block or so away, past the old house Trish and I keep looking at because it’s repairable and very cheap - old and cool - but in horrible shape and cheap. I always look at it and try to imagine it fixed up and nicer, like the old home next to it with flower gardens and a nicely trimmed lawn.
Next I enter what we call the King Street Cemetery. It has another, official name, but I don’t know what it is. In this graveyard, generations of Whites, Winslows, and the other old families of Hertford share space with Catfish Hunter’s remains, and a smattering of newer graves. Halfway through is a low spot where a creek runs through. The water is often stagnant here, and doesn’t smell so great. It was near that point that we found Tommy (who turned out to be Thomasina) the Hertford Turtle so recently returned to the wild. 
There is a sign halfway through - “No markers will be set without prior notification of the Town of Hertford.”
I wonder about that sign. For one thing - it doesn’t say you can’t BURY someone, just that you can’t mark the grave. It also makes me wonder how many people over the hundred plus years the graveyard has been there have tried to sneak in and bury someone - as if no one would notice.
After the cemetery I pass around Perquimans High School and run back through one of the worst couple of blocks of the city, where the houses are falling down, and every night you see bunches of young men with vacant-eyed stares and no future hanging out on the corner, passing poison through car windows and waiting for the next meth lab to explode. At 6:15 in the moring, no one there is awake - and most of the homes are so run-down you’d assume that they, like the old house I see at the beginning of my run, were empty and abandoned. I hate that neighborhood. I cheer when the meth labs explode. Two homes have gone that route in the last year or so, and both improved the neighborhood.
This morning’s writing revalatoin was that I need to find a study on perspective in art. I need to find out if there has ever been an artistic school where the point was to find the things that were NOT in your subject. To create, in other words, from what you don’t see, instead of trying to bring to life what you do. It’s related to Tatttered Remnants, and if such a school exists, I want to get their take on what I’m doing by a little research. If not, I’ll wing it…it’s what I do.
- ONWARD !
DNW
