My First Dead-end Job

One summer in Montreal I worked in a graveyard.

My duties involved none of those hard-core activities you'd naturally associate with cemetaries, to whit the burying, the digging up, the stealing of jewelry, the necrophilia and the like. I earned my minimum wage by mowing grass, planting flowers on graves, and generally tidying up. Looking back, I like to call this my flower-power/proto-goth period.

I'd like to make two points. First off, all people who work in graveyards for any good length of time become stark raving mad. This is one of the few literary and film stereotypes which holds any water in the real world. Complete with the dour, unshaven faces, obsessive compulsive behaviour, lack of hygiene (especially involving handkerchiefs) and generally anti-social perspectives on the world, I made sure none were standing anywhere near when I passed by an open grave.

My second observation is that adjacent graves, identical in all respects, can have totally opposite soil characteristics. This I learned by having to dig with my hands and transplant literally thousands of flowers over the course of the summer. Some grave beds were warm, soft and yielding to my hands. Others were cement-like and almost required a jack hammer to make a hole large enough to plunk in a pansy or two. I eliminated all possible variables to account for this phenomenon, and could only conclude that the once-time personality of the grave-plot's inhabitant rubbed off on the soil surrounding the coffin.

Now the inevitable graveyard trivia question: which pop mega-star wrote a ditty about a cemetary worker? The correct answer tomorrow. No prize - just a hearty round of applause from this humble scribe.