Yesterday's Adventure

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A few weeks ago I spotted an ambulance ... that in itself isn't astounding, I work at a hospital and I see them all the time. Except I'd never seen one in green and white. Then I noticed the hospital name on the side:

"Dark Knight" had some scenes filmed in Chicago, and the lot must have gotten hold of it after filming. (Yeah, okay, I'm easily amused.)

But yesterday on my way in to work, I noticed something else ...

See what I saw:

I pass a cemetery that's as old as the area's known habitation (pre-European), and there's a particular monument to a young girl:

How's this for ironic: Emma was at a funeral with her family, and died by electrocution during the service. Her father had the statue commissioned from a portrait that had been done of her shortly before her unfortunate death.

As you can see in the first photo, some one visits her grave and leaves trinkets, and recently a plastic rosary ... Well, yesterday I noticed that her stuffed animal had been knocked down. Having a touch of OCD, I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I went there after work to take care of it.

Her second necklace had also been broken, so I collected up all the beads I could find and stashed them in the crook of her elbow.

After that I had some time to kill before the next bus, so I headed to the back of the cemetery where the burial mound is.

The first time I was there, I didn't even know what it was. It's about four feet high, girded by three large trees (two oaks and a something-or-other), and although there is a post for a sign the sign itself is missing.



What I found online indicates it is estimated to be over 1,000 years old, the work of an "unknown Woodland Indian Tribe," with over 300 individuals noted (during an archeological excavation by the University of Chicago in 1928). There's indication that the burial was hurried, perhaps indicating en epidemic of disease.

Flowers on the mound:

Volcanoes and Coffee

I was telling Rose, my oldest daughter, about the Toba Event

(Toba was a volcano in Sumatra that erupted about 73,000 BCE, with an explosion far greater than anything seen since. It produced a volcanic winter - ash and gas blocking the sun - that lasted six years. This caused a general cooling that plunged the planet into an ice age)

. I told her about the cycles of warming and cooling the planet has seen just in the last 75,000 years (a blink of global history). Then I concluded that this cycle will continue, and that sooner or later, another volcano, comet, or other dramatic event will once again alter the planet's climatic cycles.

"But life will continue," I reassured her. "Life will once again crawl out of the sludge, blink in the weak sunlight, straighten its spine, find its thumbs, and proclaim to the universe:

I'm gonna put a Starbucks right there.