The Living Cemetery

On a steep bank of hills nestled between Forbes St., Ingleside Terrace and West Main St., Mountain Home Cemetery is laced with walking trails amongst the 28 acres of burial ground, which I cut through on my trips to and from campus each day. The elevation raises the cemetery out of the noise of the streets and the stress of college classes.  It takes me about six minutes to cross through the trails onto West Main. For six minutes, I soak in mortality’s perspective releasing stress over relationships and homework. Often, it’s the best part of my day.

Dog walkers, studiers, joggers and bikers join me along the path. The cemetery is a mountain home for the dead and a sanctuary for the living.

Beneath the trimmed grass blanketing the graves lie the bones and sagging clothing of a young arctic explorer, a liberal senator and civil war colonel, a Dutch potato-famine profiteer-turned Kalamazoo city developer, the seventh governor of Michigan who previously served as a horseback-traveling abolitionist judge, a female journalist and slaughter house reformer who interviewed Mark Twain, the inventor of the easily digestible pill and the man who brought electricity to Michigan’s southwest.

Mountain Home was incorporated into the City of Kalamazoo in 1849. Trustees built a sexton lodge on West Main St. and a small chapel that served as a receiving vault for corpses in the winter, when the ground was too hard to cut with shovels. The private corporation sold the land to the city for one dollar in 1938, and now these buildings stand vacant.

On the eve of Memorial Day, as I ambled up the path, I saw a man with an enormous digger labeled Kuhn’s Yard and Garden Care covering up a hole with sheets plywood.  I stepped up the grassy slope and asked him if I could peek inside.  Once close enough to see the shallow hole, I said the hole didn’t look six feet deep. “Oh that’s just an old wives tale!” He said, shaking his gut. “Graves are four feet deep these days.” He dragged the final board over the hole and left.

Bruce Merchant and Janet Hippensteel coordinate care of the city’s cemeteries from their Kalamazoo Public Service Office.  They are good-humored civil servants who finish each other’s sentences. When someone dies, funeral homes contact them to contract burial proceedings. Overseeing the cemetery brings the two unexpected occupational challenges. The hills’ steep incline pulls at the heavy memorials, which topple over under decades of stress.  Merchant and Hippensteel can’t legally repair these fallen headstones, because the sold plots are private property. “Most of the people that are buried there don’t have any relatives that maintain that grave. Stones fall over, stones get pushed over, foundations weren’t made properly.  We don’t know what to do all the time because we don’t have money, nor can we legally touch that stone,” said Merchant.

The two collect articles and historical documents on Mountain Home including a copy of the burial ground’s incorporation document, and the original deed to the land written in fountain pen and marked with sealing wax. The incorporation booklet offers rules for the cemetery concerning the sales and maintenance including rule three, which states, “Strangers can receive, on application to any Trustee, a permit to enter the cemetery with a carriage on any days other than Sundays and Holidays.” And twelve: “No person is to be admitted on horse-back.”

Gravestones face the trails partitioning the fifteen sections in the cemetery, marked with white numbered and lettered signs. As I walk along the paths, hundreds of cut stones vie for attention, and I remember a quote from a radio show. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the graved. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” I contemplate these deaths most days as I pass by my favorite headstones for the Lakes, the Sterns, and the Bryants. They are twice dead and anticipating a third and final death. Sometimes, I murmur the names printed on the graves I walk past.

Patrick Gailey ’12 found one headstone of interest early in his time studying at K. He refers to the handsome car-sized memorial commemorating the Bardeen family by name. "If you go on a walk in the graveyard, chances are you’re going to end up at Bardeen. It’s where the path naturally leads you,” he said. He and his friends walk past the sign discouraging their entrance after dark, ascend to the cemetery’s highest point and climb atop the Bardeen’s tomblike memorial. They engage in what Gailey calls “illicit activities” on top of the stone while enjoying the view of Kalamazoo. “I’ve always done a lot of thinking about Bardeen” he said. “Is it disrespectful that you’re just hanging out with friends on top of this beautiful family gravestone? I’ve always thought that it’s actually more of like an honor to enjoy life on top of the gravestone. To hang out there, and maybe even by hanging out there with friends, you’re like absorbing some of this wisdom of this very old family.”

Gailey breaks incorporation rule number eight, which states that “all persons who shall be found on the grounds making unseemly noises or otherwise conducting themselves unsuitably to the purposes to which the grounds are appropriated will be requested to leave the grounds.”  Unlike the rest of the archaic rules, Merchant and Hippensteel see modern application to this rule. “I think the saddest part is the lack of respect that people have anymore for cemeteries,” said Hippensteel, who has served through many acts of vandalism, including one year the week after Memorial Day weekend, some vandals knocked over more than 80 headstones at Riverside Cemetary. “That’s the stuff that breaks my heart,” she said. “I just don’t understand why people have to be so destructive and disturb something like that. It just makes no sense to me whatsoever.”

Though Merchant and Hippensteel disapprove of Gailey’s “illicit activities” on Bardeen, they understand the impulse of the living to connect with the deceased. Their office sponsors cemetery clean-up days around Memorial Day weekend during which boy scouts plant flags and collect rubbish and mementos scattering the graves. “The things people leave on the gravesites are interesting,” said Merchant. Volunteers often find framed photos, stuffed animals, flowers, money, balloons and unopened beer bottles places near headstones. The beer, says Hippensteel, is left by sons on Father’s Day who drink a bottle sitting near the grave and leave one for their dad.  “That’s something that’s touching to me,” she said.

The night after I speak with the man who dug the grave, I walk back through Mountain Home’s trail and approach the abandoned site.  I stand before the plywood covering the hole, and lift the corner of one board.  Expecting to see nothing, the cement vault lining the bottom of the grave frightens me, and I back away.

On Memorial Day, parents bring their sons to the cemetery to remind them of fallen soldiers. The children are excited, spotting entire families whose labeled stones somehow connote a household like theirs packed down into the dirt beneath them. A boy remarked that a tombstone bearing the last name “Ash” reminds him of the Pokémon character of the same name. An elderly couple pulled up onto the path in a rust colored Subaru Outback. They emerged with a potted red pansy and a trawl. The elderly man in a salmon polo and jeans knelt onto his long haunches and broke earth with the trawl as his wife filled up a navy watering can at a wooden and steel spigot. When she returned, her husband had packed the flower into the dry ground. He stood up, stared at his work for a moment, and his wife drizzled water onto the flower. A young couple emerged from on top of the hill and whizzed by on their Schwinn bicycles, screaming. The woman continued to water the plant slowly, and the bikers skirted by silently once they saw they weren’t alone. They circled by on their bikes once more as the elderly couple threw out the green plastic flowerpot and shut the Subaru’s trunk. The car slipped into reverse before heading forward up the hill along the cement path. Stretching his eyes to see up the hill, the man in the salmon polo ran over a dead gray bird, already smashed into the path. As the car pulled away, flies inspected the bird’s facedown carcass and its fettered feathers.

When I walk past the hole the next morning on my way to class, I see the tents and chairs set up around the gravesite in preparation of a funeral at noon.  After class, I walk past the site again where I see a man named Tom de Vreese operating a metal apparatus over the hole with arms flecked by white sunspots.  I ask what he’s doing, and he tells me he’s lowering the casket.  I’m surprised by his openness as he explains how he slides the casket onto rollers out of the back of his covered truck and lowers it into the earth on a system of straps. “It’s a one person job.  I do one or two a day,” he said smiling with his blue eyes. I peer into the hole again, and see a dark wooden casket covered by six wilting roses nestled into the cement vault. I asked him if he knows the name of the woman he just buried. “Nope! I never do.”

As I pass the fresh grave one day later, the ground is brown and compacted over the hole, carpeted with grass seeds.

Memorial night shadows over the graveyard. Dusk meets crickets, moonlight, and spring’s first fireflies. The graves cast no more shadows, and the storm that never came smells humid and sweet between the warm grass and cool air. On the rolling hills, gravestones are just visible and dull in the purple light. The trees are still, and I remember what Patrick Gailey said about his future burial.  “I want the people I leave behind to commemorate my death in a way that gives them peace,” he said.  “Graveyards are for the living."

The Timid Rabbit's Greatest Trick

Disguised as a condemned building atop Kalamazoo’s West Main Hill sits the Timid Rabbit Magic and Masquerade Shop. The store’s draped front windows, cracking signage and peeling burgundy and purple paint job contrast the surrounding trappings of gleaming sprawl: Dominoes, KFC, and a Marathon gas station. The entrance is only accessible through a weed-ravaged driveway leading to a ten-spot parking lot in which a 1969 Cadillac hearse with a green siren light permanently rusts. Concrete walls painted orange and imitation stone painted burgundy and gray form the back façade as though a castle, store front and suburban home were surgically joined. Scattered against these walls lies an empty storage bucket as well as a Halloween candy witch’s cauldron, a blue piece of scrap wood and a trampoline. From outside, the back door’s “OPEN” sign is the only indication of life, but inside is a vital story of time-tested adaptation and fantasy.

Entering the Timid Rabbit is entering a world apart from the frantic West Main intersection. The muted whir of a heater and the buzzing of florescent lights fill the hanging air. Glade room fresheners placed throughout the store combat the sedentary musk of eleven thousand costumes squeezed onto racks and racks that cram all the way to the back wall forming a cramped maze of cotton, sequins, top hats and polyester.

The bells tied to the door jingle in the entrance of a woman in sweatpants. She apologizes for her tardy return of the red-fringed flapper dress that she rented three days prior. Behind the counter, shop co-owner Laura Gerard gently smiles. “You finally made it in!” she says. From under her unwashed hair, the woman’s face breaks.

“Oh, you have no idea; it’s just been the worst two days of my life. My fiancé has been cheating on me, and he decided to tell me about it today.”

Laura’s rehearsed motions freeze. “He decided to tell you about it today?”

“He thinks that he’s gonna come home tonight and everything’s gonna be great. But I’m going out tonight, tomorrow night…”

“Well you should. Just go have some fun. Don’t do anything stupid, but go have some fun. You need it”

“I’m just really distraught right now.”

The two chatter on like old friends about infidelity as Laura fines the woman only one day’s late fee. The bells jingle again, and Laura turns around, rolling her eyes. “I’m quite often the bartender," she says.

This isn’t the first time a stranger has sought refuge inside the Timid Rabbit.

“It happens a lot cause I’m older. I think they feel like they can sound off to me,” she says, letting a little pride seep from behind her gold-framed glasses. “A lot of people come in here and tell me their life story, but I always feel compelled to help them. I don’t know why.”

Laura is approachable in that Midwestern way with a kind voice that often slides into impersonations. Highlights streak her shoulder-length blond hair, and she works in jeans, a thick navy t-shirt and black Mary Janes. She laughs easily and often at others’ jokes as well as her own. Perhaps it’s Laura’s motherly presence that attracts needy customers to the shop. Or maybe people come in search of something else: a new identity, a different skin, a red flapper dress. If Laura’s prescription for heartbreak is masking the pain with fun, maybe disguise is medicinal.

Moments later, the phone rings. Resting her elbows on the glass countertop with her back arched, Laura responds to the caller’s request for a Boy George costume with all the professionalism of a hospital receptionist, which she once was.

His hair was brown right? Okay. I’ll look,” she says as she peers around the store from behind the counter. From Laura’s viewpoint, giant mascot heads of Rudolph, a pig and three Easter bunnies lay on the worn beige carpet. Masks of the Cowardly Lion, the Burger King, Darth Maul and a pit bull stare at her expectantly on shelves affixed to the ceiling. A Richard Nixon mask with a cracked mouth perches on the seat of a red velvet king’s throne placed in front of a rack of costumes with labels like “Sea Diva Mermaid,” and “Medical Mary Jane Nurse.” This collection of dresses bearing midriffs, fiber optic miniskirts and deep necklines is designated for college theme party apparel.

Across the room stands a cluttered set of glass-encased countertops backed with bookshelves filled with curiosities: a Mardi Gras disguise, a book on déjà vu, a rubber dog mask displayed atop a drum of drinking water, a Day-Glo pink wig, a latex set of bear teeth, a dried puddle of wood glue, a collection of wooly mammoth fossil molds, two motionless Disco balls, oversized magic cards, doodles on scrap paper of Yin-Yangs, a tooth container, and a syringe.

This stockpile took 30 years to amass under the ownership of Laura and her husband Antony. The costume rental side of the business began out of the couple’s 11th street home, which cramped the family’s living space. The shop found permanent store front West Main in 1990. Over that time period, the couple raised two sons and the costume rental and magic shop expanded into a Karate school run by their youngest son, Nick, a temporary apartment upstairs for their eldest son, Tony II, and his girlfriend and home to a mask and mascot-making workshop and special effects studio dubbed “Gerard Enterprises.”

Gerard Enterprises used to travel the trade show circuit across the country, where the family would sell their hand-made costumes, masks and mascot bodies and heads, and hobnob with the magic world’s elite. At one point, Antony produced and sold almost 30,000 latex masks each year, which he shipped all over the country.

After September 11, though, the industry changed, says Laura. “The first year it was all fear, and the media did that, unfortunately. They were telling people, ‘don’t go trick-or-treating ‘cause they’ll bomb you,’” she said. “After 9/11, the smaller businesses started dropping out only because the Wal-Marts and the Party Citys took over, and the smaller mom and pop shops couldn’t handle it anymore. We can’t beat their prices. Wal-mart buys for millions of stores around the country, and we buy for one store. Our prices wholesale are more than what they’re retailing them for. So, it got pretty hard.”

Then came the recession, and business got even worse. “People lost their jobs, and we’re not the type of business that you need,” said Laura. “We’re the type of business that if you have extra money and want to have a party you’re going to have fun, but people were worried about paying their bills and eating, not about throwing parties and renting a costume.”

The shop’s diversified business model, in which the Gerards rent out costumes in addition to selling them, ended up rescuing The Timid Rabbit while others filed for Chapter 11. “We’ve got a lot of irons in the fire,” said Antony. “If one business does poorly, then at least we’re still able to stay open.” However, the rental option necessitates the daily minutia of tracking down unreturned costumes with the police and repairing damaged rentals. “We’ve had people fall into fires in polyester costumes,” said Laura “We had a guy return a vintage tuxedo with no sleeves ‘cause he went into a mosh pit. We’ve had people cut wigs. We’ve had people cut pants, staples, glue, things that you just don’t think people would do.”

Worse than removing staples from hemmed hoop skirts, the true occupational hazard for the Gerards lies on the creative end of their costume design. “We have to be very careful about what we make,” said Laura. By law, the Gerards cannot buy a costume someone made from a pattern because it’s trademarked. “There are a lot of laws, and I don’t understand some of them,” she said. “But Barney started the whole thing. He put I don’t know how many costume shops out of business.”

According to Laura, Barney representatives hired an attorney who called every costume shop in the country, feigning interest in a purple dinosaur suit. After one such phone call in which Laura offered the attorney a similar costume, the couple received a cease and desist order and a $100,000 copyright lawsuit. Antony served as their attorney and the judge threw out the case after three years. “I try to keep that fiasco out of my memory banks,” admits Antony. “When someone takes three and a half years of a person’s life, it’s not fun.”

The same diverse business model that has supported the Gerard family has been internalized into their personas. Antony’s chance donning of a layer’s suit marks only one character in a long list of roles he’s played. A sturdy man with a blue Hawaiian shirt, and gray roots peeking out beneath shoulder length wisps of platinum blonde hair, Antony proudly recalls working as an event planner, a special effects engineer, a professional locksmith, a self taught paleontologist, a professional clown, a video producer, a world-touring magician, a leather smith, and an author. “Most of what I do is more of a passion than a business,” he says.

Laura, a former timid rabbit herself, has also been transformed by character. Years of interacting with a needy consumer base taught her confidence. “I’ve always been creative, but I didn’t think I was,” she said. “I think I got a lot more self-aware. I used to be shy and thought I was ugly and stupid—things like that. Now, if people don’t like me, that's okay. Being in the spotlight helps,” she laughed. “Now I’m the bartender.”

The Timid Rabbit’s greatest trick, say the Gerards, is its ability to make fantasies come true. “We try not to be your typical Halloween shop,” says Antony, identifying himself with his store. He says people use costumes for affordable escape. “A lot of people want to take a vacation, but they can’t afford a vacation,” he said. “When a person walks into the shop, we talk to them for a moment to try to find out a little more about them and then give them suggestions. When they wear the costumes, they can be literally anything they want to be.”

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So Relevant!

This comic is awesome.  It also makes reference to two of the works we've touched on, Orwell's Shooting the Elephant, and Capote's In Cold Blood.