Parallax

"You know you're Floridian when you're under 30 and you have friends over 70." Yep. To add to that: some of them have been dead for years, and they can still make you feel guilty about not visiting.

Tried to do so today, as I was in the neighborhood, so to speak; every time I pass by a particular cemetery I remember, oh, Hans is buried in this one, I oughta go find him one of these days. So today I did. Or tried to. I couldn't locate the grave.

I knew Hans from the old neighborhood. His place was a crumbling, neglected Spanish pile (which, at the time, they all were - this was before the Great Godawful Yuppification had set in) directly across the street from the one I grew up in. To the left (from standing on my porch - his right) was the old cat-lady who'd go grocery shopping in a slip, and to the right was the elderly but sprightly couple who were very active and friendly with everyone; the husband would dress up in a Santa suit (he needed no fake beard) whenever someone arranged a Christmas party for the neighborhood kids.

We didn't know Hans very well; he mostly kept to himself, and every weekday went out and came home precisely the same times of day in a shiny, perfectly maintained, black BMW. The garage in which it was kept, awesomely, was covered in plants and looked about ready to cave in. He gave us paper grocery bags filled with grapefruit, and would wave or say hi when he saw me. My mom and grandmother knew him better. I found him a little intimidating, but when I was a kid I found most people intimidating. I barely know anything about his life before we were neighbors. He'd got out of Europe sometime either during or after WWII; he had a tattoo on his arm, and never said which camp he'd survived. We didn't pry. If he didn't want to talk about it, we weren't going to make him.

With that, his name wasn't Hans, it was Heinz, and I can perfectly imagine the cultural divide between an old Jew and an old Estonian, him and my grandmother barking at each other like elephant seals when they met: HANS? HEINZ! HANS? HEINZ! Hans must have been acceptable though, because he was always nice to us.

(The Estonian Hans, by the way, rhymes with "hunts." The other one sounds wrong to me. Ah, culture.)

My mom went to his funeral, when he died - she said it was mostly people from work, and that she was the only one from the neighborhood who went. I was... thirteen or fourteen at the time, and either wasn't interested or didn't find out about it until after the fact. Maybe I had school. I don't remember. She didn't remember there being any family at the funeral, and she's always been happy with herself for going. The old guy needed someone there who wasn't an employee, you know?

Anyway - that's where I wound up today, in the middle of a Jewish cemetery, surrounded by lush greenery and headstones as tall as me (note that I behaved myself and did not climb on them to peer over them), with a couple of rocks in my hand, in 95-degree heat, scampering around in ranging circles because if the place was in any kind of order I couldn't figure it out. My mother couldn't quite remember what his last name had been, except that I needed to look for a Heinz and not a Hans, the ceremony had been towards the back, and since it was a million degrees out she'd stay in the car thank you.

Sweaty and defeated, I deposited my rocks on a stone from 1944 that didn't have any, and did what any nerd would do: came home and pointed Firefox at the city public records. I checked the land records to see if I could get a lock on the name, but those only went back to the end of 1996, where that twit Abel (he was a dink, but that's another story) had sold the place after renovating it. The database where they keep all the deeds and weddings and whatnot was, of course, not working. So I hedged my bets and fired an email off to the county's park office, Gators And Dead People Department, offering as many details as I could.

I got an email back saying there are three Jewish cemeteries there, not just one (how did I miss the others?) and the phone numbers for each.

That's going to be an interesting set of phone calls.

Oh, one other neat little thing: each gate-post had a plastic bin nailed to it that was full of little rocks. Jews are so awesome. They think of everything beforehand.