I tinkle on your grave

Proud Parenting Moments:

If anyone knows how to get in touch with that midget medium from Poltergeist, please have her call me. Why you ask? Well, I think we might have angered the dead in a big way the other night on our walk home from dinner.
We went to Ted’s Firehouse Pub for their gut busting dollar night and sucked in some greasy goodness and cheap beer. Tod had a massage, so Anna and I decided to take advantage of the great weather and walk the short walk home after dinner. Our street is a pretty diverse street. Greenwood Avenue is capped on each end with a church and houses the city’s Mosque and a Hispanic church in between. There are abandoned homes as well as stately homes from the past (such as ours, natch). There is also Mount Evergreen Cemetery, the final resting place for many of Michigan’s earliest residents. Some of the monuments are buffed smooth by the many years of Michigan weather. Some are amazingly ornate, others are simple stones propped up in the ground. The cemetery is truly a mini mountain (hence the name), and its monument dotted grounds roll and pitch behind wrought iron fences.
As we merrily walked along Greenwood, we came across one of the few access gates along the street. Anna bolted into the cemetery and ran for a few dozen yards. I was chasing after her and she finally stopped and turned back to me and said, “Papa, what is this?” as she pointed to a grave marker carved to look like a tree stump. I began telling her about how this was a place where people went after they died. Death is a relatively new concept for her thanks to a recent visit to Grandma and Grandpa McMillen. Not sure how or why the concept of death came up, but she was suddenly worried that Yukon wouldn’t be around much longer when she came home. We had a nice little toddler talk, and I think she’s okay with the general concept of death. Thanks Grandma!

She seemed generally interested in the grave stones and deftly meandered through the cemetery. We climbed up a rather big hill and when we got to the top Anna turned to me and in her thishastohappenrightnow voice said, “Papa, I have to go potty!”

Shit.

Thankfully it wasn’t that, she only had to pee, so we found a rather large monument for privacy and I sized it up to guesstimate where the dearly departed may be and aimed Anna’s bottom away from that spot. I don’t know why I was worried about privacy in a grave yard, as we were the only people roaming around that night at 7:15. Anna did her business and I checked out the names on the monument. I said “Sorry about this” out loud and mentioned their names. Anna didn’t seem to be too concerned about the wrath of the pissed on and pissed off dead, and ran off to check out another large grave stone.

I however patted the stone and reminded them that they were kids once too and she meant no harm.