HELLO-WEEN JACK

Hello-ween Jack,

Just in time for Halloween.

You wrote in your last letter of going to see a band from your rockin' days. This last Sunday my Times, the Arts and Leisure section, reviewed Keith Richards' autobiography.

The Ghost of Celebrities Nearly Departed is shown in a half-page profile with partially smoked cigarette leaning from his protruding lower lip. The photographer knew what he was about and shot with black and white film. All I can say is - three-day old corpse. Maybe any photograph of Keith would say that no matter the film, but black and white was the perfect choice.

Obviously, too, the gang in the composition department had their little joke. Keith was the half page above the fold while sweet, fresh-as-a-country breeze Taylor Swift was in the lower left corner leaning on pillows and cast in a golden glow.

I don't know but I find reassuring somehow that Keith has been noticeably decaying these past three decades and more yet still he's here smoking another fag despite the times, they be a-changing. And to imagine I'm old enough to remember when a Stones' album cover, controversial for some reason at the time and before most people alive today were born, pictured the gang and Keith as dissipated Regency Rogues sprawled about after a debauch.

I don't know if you'll find them at all artistic or interesting, but it is Halloween and I just thought I'd send you some photographs, I took myself.

I spent a certain number of mid-summer afternoons and evenings in Mount Hope Cemetery and never visited the place without clicking off dozens of these pictures. If you never heard of it when you visited here and about, Mount Hope is quite an usual place. Perhaps you can tell that from the photos alone without my writing it.

About a third to a half of Mount Hope is, in a phrase I've settled on, a cemetery in a forest. Some would say, perhaps more accurately, a cemetery in a park. It's keepers, however, seem to leave it most of the summer largely natural, as natural as such a place can be. The hill I was standing on for the shot of the wedding party being photographed, I couldn't have easily gotten my own picture from for all the underbrush that was there only a short time before that day along with the trees and fallen stones you see.

The building glimpsed through those trees in the lower left corner is the oldest of the cemetery's chapels and the lush foliage in the background of the scene mask a steep hill side known as the Indian Trail. It backs and over tops the chapel and its statuary fountain and comes around on the other, the right side of the shot to another steep sloped plateau parallel with the hill I was on at the time. That flat topped hill is so densely settled with monuments, mausoleums and obelisks that it might be a small Roman or Greek city of classic antiquity.

If I climbed left on the first hill, following a barely visible track up and around it, I'd be opposite the toga clad lady with the anchor in the next photograph taken from above on her hillside. It, too, is quite a steep and a long climb up those wrought iron steps the gate of which you can make out near the foot of her pedestal. You can, perhaps, tell just how steep from the little bit of hand rail visible. Her plot of ground is only the first of three tiers on the hill, each populated by more such large monuments topped with posed, dramatic figures. Seen from below in the vale, they go narrowly up against another green background, the trees, the forest covering the slopes of yet another hill also planted with stones and monuments in scenes hidden from view until you come to them.

There are, of course, angels everywhere and in all manner of poses. My favorite is Serena, the Angel of Peace. I took endless photographs of her and climbed all about to find every angle I could. The one I'm proudest of is this one I got during a summer evening with the sunset lighting bits of her surrounding trees and other and toppling stones beneath her. I had to climb up to Serena's crest for a close up of her, though, as she would never come down for me.

If there is one photograph that says, 'cemetery in a forest,' it is the one that shows only stones and monuments going up among trees and different angled slopes of a hill. I think it must have been taken around the same hour as the first shot of Serena and I know I was near her place. The same light suggests as much. There is a barely visible trail along the base of the slope face there toward the left and further up that trail is an especially affecting group of monuments. The father was a justice of the State Supreme Court. The parents' stones are larger but their son's is the only one with a figure carved in bas-relief. It isn't a cherub or other symbolic being but a school boy about ten. A doggerel verse declares that he isn't dead but only gone off to school, a school whose headmaster is Christ who will know to guide and protect him. The spot is secluded from any of the roadways that circle through Mount Hope. It is closed about by the angles and turns of the hill. Tree tops above shade them. The path that goes by, like all the paths among the graves, seems unmade by any effort other than the footsteps that have worn it through the years.

Some around here refer to Mount Hope as a spooky place and, I believe, there is to be some sort of Halloween affair over there this weekend. But I can't see it. Somewhere in his writings, Bill Faulkner made comment on how the Victorians, the generations that raised him, had a particular fancy for funerals and all the rites and practices that went along with bereavement. It was those same Victorians who chose this odd piece of real estate on hills coming up to the Genesee as their local place to frolic at that favorite pastime of theirs. Nothing that has been done in that line since has been as poised or as sweet and their thought to put it all down in such picturesque surroundings has just made of it something I can't call at all eerie or chilling.

It is worth experiencing and what better season than this.

Of course, Keith Richards will never be seen in such a place.

He's merely going to petrify some day over his Stratocaster, a cigarette half smoked in his lips. And, unlike the supposed Russian saint in Dostoevsky, he will corrupt no further.

How could he?