Forty minutes to sunset.  Skies are mixed, some thin strato-cumulus clouds but otherwise jello blue sky.  Temp is in the upper 50s and just ideal for running x-miles—which I did already. 

There were two matters somewhat out of my routine that I got involved in here today.   The first found me taking exception, while running, to a piece of plastic yellow ‘CAUTION’ ribbon tied to the lower limb of an ornamental tree aside the road.  It had been there all summer and finally I decided that it was just stupidly un-scenic.  So I ran up to it and yanked it from the tree.  Yikes—a stirring hornet nest was exposed bouncing up and down with the recoil of the limb!  Luckily, I neither had to yank very hard for very long (thus not a catastrophic disturbance) nor, because I was already running, was I an immobile target.  Nonetheless, it got me talking out loud to that arboreal booby trap . (You may be wondering what I said.  I said, “Can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man.”)

The other matter happened later during the same x-miles sojourn some miles there further along.  I was running at a moderate pace around a rather blind corner (trees and shrubbery) and about to head up a steep hill when I ‘thought’ I detected the Living.  (You must understand that Dreamland—cemetery—is closed to the Living during the after-hours when I can sometimes be found here.)  Not sure if it was the scent of the Living, the sound of the Living, or just a psychic sense of mine that got me alerted.  In any case, sure enough, there was a young teenage couple strolling down the hill, hand-in-hand, and when they saw me, the girl did not hesitate to petition to me: “Can you please help us get out of here!”  Yes, they were locked in.  Yes, they were lost.  And, yes, I could help them out.  I thought of just providing them directions to the only low fence that provides easy exit, but realized they’d likely just get re-lost following my accurate but necessarily intricate directions (Dreamland’s quite the maze to those not fully familiar with it.)   So instead I began escorting them the ¾ miles along winding paths, over a bridge spanning a stream, and past innumerable but always remarkable tombstones.  The girl admitted to me: “We’ve been lost for so long here—before we found you—that we actually stopped at a few graves and asked for directions.”  I laughed and said “Actually, if you waited until dark and the spirits were assisting, the tombstones might have started glowing one after another to point you the way out.”

The young girl’s mother called the girl’s cell phone as I was escorting them out and the mother was already apparently aware of their turmoil.  The girl informed her Mom that ‘a man’ was helping them out.  Then the relay of questions from Mom to daughter and directed to me began:  “What’s your name?”  “Do you work here?”  “What section are we in?”  Ad absurdum.  Obviously, the Mom had visions of me as some sort of Day Walker or Night Stalker and feared her daughter might prematurely just have found her final resting place.  I answered only one of the questions, What’s your name?, by raising my outer shirt to reveal a tee shirt that only had a question mark on it.  “I don’t know what my name is or who I am,” I replied to the girl.  “I’ve lost my identity here and am searching for it.”  The young man accompanying the girl thought my response was hilarious and insisted on snapping a photo of me as 'a question mark' with his camera phone. 

(actually another pic, same shirt)

Anyway…

We finally arrived and I showed the two grateful teenagers the low fence, instructed them how to scale it, and then parted, saying: “I wish I could join you and hop the fence, but I can’t.”  “Why not?”, the girl genuinely inquired.  Nodding my head directionally back towards the heart of the cemetery, I said “That’s home, back there.  Not allowed to leave anymore.  After all, I’m only your apparition.”  We all ‘got it’ and laughed.

But I did go back.  And now, having sat and written this, the sun has already set.  And since all of Earth is home to me, home also this will always be.