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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, August 18, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Tombstone tales I've got my first stop picked out for my next visit to Paris and it's not the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower or a café on the Left Bank. It's a leafy 109-acre sanctuary in the 20th arrondisement -Pere Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in the world. Darned near everybody who was anybody is in there - and not just those of the Gallic persuasion. Oscar Wilde is buried in Pere Lachaise along with Proust, Balzac and Colette. Gertrude Stein, unlike her pronouncement on Oakland, California is there, there; so is Isadora Duncan. Artists? Delacroix, Dore, Pissarro, Seurat. Composers? Chopin, Enescu. Entertainers? Yves Montand, Edith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Callas. There's even plot space for a hell-raiser like Jim Morrison of The Doors. Pere Lachaise is probably the ultimate trip for cemetery cruisers, but truth to tell I don't need to visit a celebrity graveyard to enjoy my darker side. Pretty well any marble orchard will do. I love the cemetery ambiance, although I don't usually admit it out loud -- not after I blurted it out at a cocktail party one evening. "What are your hobbies?" a woman asked. "Walking", I said. "Me too," she said. "Where do you hike?" "Cemeteries mostly," I said. She looked at me woodenly and muttered: "You're creeping me out." Her loss. Cemeteries are splendid places to perambulate at leisure. Generously treed and lovingly landscaped, devoid of vehicular traffic and commercial eye clutter -- and of course, pleasingly silent. Why not? Everybody's sleeping. And unless there's a funeral in progress, most cemeteries are deserted. I can't for the life of me understand why. I've walked in unfamiliar cemeteries for decades and never once been asked to leave. As long as you don't bring a picnic and a boom box the authorities won't bother you. And it's not as if the residents are going to complain. No need to bring along a paperback or a newspaper, there's plenty of reading material in the cemetery, much of it poignant. The information is Hemingwayesque - simple, but freighted with meaning. A cracked marble stone tells you that the woman beneath it was born in 1899, died 1918, along with her infant Melissa. Hmmm....The Spanish Flu pandemic? Or did she die in childbirth? Only nineteen years old. Was her husband overseas? Missing in action? You can almost feel a short story writing itself. And then there are the epitaphs. Most of them are generic and clichéd: At Rest; Gone But Not Forgotten; Asleep in the Arms of Jesus; Ready to Meet My Maker. Those are the boring ones. They sound uninspired, mechanical; the mortician's equivalent of the Hallmark Card. But some folks, bless 'em, realize that the blank space on their tombstone represents their last best chance to sum up in a few chiselled words, what their whole life has meant to them. An epitaph is the ultimate in afterthoughts. Some are gloomy - the stone over poet Charles Bukowski's grave reads I NEVER LIKED IT ANYHOW. W.C. Fields gravestone is popularly believed to say ON THE WHOLE, I'D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA. A flinthearted, defiantly anonymous Vermonter saw to it that his tombstone read: I WAS SOMEBODY. WHO, IS NO BUSINESS OF YOURS Other epitaph writers choose to leave us with a smile on our faces. Johnny Carson's choice? I'LL BE RIGHT BACK. Phyllis Diller wants her epitaph to read I DIED LAUGHING. Larry King has opted for HE FINALLY MET A DEADLINE. Canada's own W.P. Kinsella has his afterlife all planned out. He intends to spend it under a stone with the inscription: AT LAST, TIME TO CATCH UP ON MY READING. There is reported to be, in (where else?) the Boot Hill Cemetery in (where else?) Tombstone, Arizona, a headstone over the grave of one Lester Moore, an ex-Wells Fargo cargo agent that reads: HERE LIES LESTER MOORE FOUR SLUGS FROM A .44 NO LESS, NO MORE. Leave 'em laughing -good advice for comedians and cadavers alike. I reckon the only big mistake an epitaph writer can make is to take him or herself too seriously. The robustly ego'd author Vladimir Nabokov penned his own epitaph in his book Pale Fire. "Other men die," wrote Nabokov, "but I am not another; therefore I'll not die." But that's not the tale told by a tombstone in the Cimitiere de Clarens in Montreux, Switzerland tells. It reads: VLADIMIR NABOKOV 1899 - 1977 Bethesda House 905-623-6050 or 1-800-338-3397 Are you in an abusive relationship? 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