There was an unwritten rule that Sunday drives included ice cream. My father would always make sure that we would stop at the Tasty Freeze or the Dairy Queen and buy big ice cream cones.  Having grown up in a poor family during the Great Depression, my father never had ice cream as a child. To him an ice cream cone was a luxury and he took great pride in being able to buy ice cream for his family.

            My father not only loved ice cream, he also loved cemeteries. He loved to drive through cemeteries and to get out and walk past the stones, reading the “born and died dates.” He liked to look at the pictures that many people had mounted on their gravestones. He used to tease me that when he died he was going to have them add a money slot on his tombstone where you had to put in a quarter for his picture to pop up. He would joke that he was so handsome that people should have to pay to see his picture.

            Many of our Sunday drives ended in cemeteries. We strolled, we talked, we held hands, and we celebrated life there among the dead. We sat on the benches by the goldfish pond and watched the fish dart through the water like swift moving glimpses of sunshine. We peered into the mausoleums where the “rich people” were entombed. Sometimes we visited the graves of people we had known and loved. My father would bend down to clean off the stones, check on the flowers, and reflect on the life that had touched ours. Many times, my father would pause to brush off the stones of those he had never known, just to let them know that someone cared and remembered that they too had once lived to laugh on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.