Visiting graves. in A small but passable life.

Yesterday morning while be-bopping around the interwebs I stumbled upon a website, findagrave.com. I took the bait.

The first data field I filled in was for my paternal grandfather. And within a second there it was, a small dark weathered stone set in the ground with his name and his dates: 1895-1955. I then realized that I might be the first in the family to see it since it was placed there. Mom said that she thought he was buried while my Dad was at the end of his two year stay in the hospital with polio. She also said that neither her nor Dad had ever visited and she wasn’t even sure where he was buried.

For the next search I dug a little deeper. When Daughter was still a wee one we took a trip to Texas to visit her Grandparents. While there we took another day trip further into the state. We ended up visiting the daughter of an old friend of mine. There was a guy there, and I don’t remember exactly how it came up, that we talked about Michelle’s little sister Marsha. Marsha had still been making sojourns to Texas from Wichita over the past years. Anyway, the guy said that Michelle had died in a car crash. I took it with a grain of salt but over the next several years I tried to find out if it were true. But in those early days of the interwebs information archived was sparse.

I first met Michelle in 1977 in West Germany after she had brought her nine month old son to join her husband who I had already befriended and were barracks rats with. The party then moved from the barracks to a fifth floor coldwater walk-up flat that they had rented just outside the back walk-in gate to the base.

There are at least a couple of dozen good stories I could tell about the following decade before we all lost contact. The last time I had seen her I had taken a girlfriend to Wichita to just see everybody. She had divorced her husband by then and was living with her mother and sister.

We talked on the phone a couple of times over the next couple of years.

I drove to Wichita from Missouri on my way to Texas a couple of times in the late eighties but hadn’t been able to see her for one reason or another.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=36280004

So now I know that guy in Texas wasn’t just talking out his ass.

Buoyed by my successful searches I dug a little deeper, looking for a girl who was murdered in our sophomore year of high school. No luck. I type in a google search and it spits out Ted Bundy. Bundy was roaming around the area, but didn’t kill her, her boyfriend did. There were also multiple hits for another serial killer roaming around the area at the time, Warren Leslie Forrest.

Oh well, old news. It’s just that I had known Debbie all through school and she was the first and to this day, as far as I know, the only murder victim I’ve known.

I also stumbled upon a new show to watch- “Black Mirror”. Last night I watched the first two seasons of three episodes each. Outstanding dystopian tales. Why do the British write so much better TV? I’ll be starting season three tonight.

I’ve also starting watching “Westworld”. I’ve seen everything in the franchise. So far, so good.