L leared today that Erich died yesterday afternoon, two weeks short of the ninety days the doctors gave him in the beginning. She’s talked with Erich’s daughter, and made some preliminary contacts for someone from Gulf Coast Mensa to lead a memorial service in November. L was of course upset by the news initially, but appears to be taking it pretty resiliently as she usually does in situations like this. She and M had gone down to see him last Sunday, and knew already that his time was very short.
On a less somber subject, I spent part of this afternoon working with Save Austin’s Cemeteries on one of their workdays, working on their great project of documenting all the headstones in Oakwood, the oldest of the city’s main cemeteries. Despite an intermittent rain, I took my digital camera out and shot multiple pictures of each headstone in a lot, while dictating each photo’s assigned reference number to a scribe accompanying me. The pair of us managed to finish five lots in the two hours we had available. Workdays are supposed to happen every first Saturday, now that the weather’s cooled down enough that anyone can stand to be out at the cemetery. As with so many old urban cemeteries, many of the stones are damaged from aging and from vandalism, and it’s important to document every one we can now, in case stones disappear in the future, which they undoubtedly will; they have done hitherto.
The one best stone I saw today was an 1880s-era tablet stone with a vine-and-grapes motif (cf. John 15:5) running around the borders, a style that I’d never seen an exact parallel for. I was amused to find the person to whom the stone belonged was a Parisian by birth, which perhaps suggested the vinous motif to the stonecutter.
Sam Houston adventures with a Texas humanist. Fnord.
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