Better Tombstones Poem by John Allen Richter

As a young man 17,18 and 19 - I lived in Germany as a soldier with the Untied States Army. During that period I lived for a while in an army post in Boblingen, (what was then West Germany) a rather large but medium sized city in the Stuttgart area. My interests back then were varied - but fairly simple. I became a marathon runner - running 10 to 20 miles 3 or 4 times a week - when sunlight permitted. Germans meticulously keep their forests so beautiful and with crushed gravel paths that are so wonderful to run through. Other nights I spent with friends and colleagues at local pubs and dance halls - chasing girls and enjoying friendships. Unfortunately some of the people in my circle were experimenting with drugs - specifically peyote and LSD... Hallucigens. And I fell prey to experimenting as well very briefly.

The main road from our post to the nearest pub - was about a three mile walk - there was a large cemetery on one side of the road and an equally large apple orchard on the other. I had walked through the cemetery many times and was fascinated by the headstones there - and mausoleums - which unlike my own fairly new country - had many tombstones 1,000 years or older. The oldest one I found there which was still partially readable was from the 10th century - year 946 I believe. But there were also older ones - which were so completely weather worn that you just could not read them. The cemetery was absolutely fascinating and beautiful.

Sometimes on my return trip back to the post in the wee morning hours I would stroll through the cemetery - to enjoy its calm and peace. Other nights I would climb over the 8 foot fence surrounding the orchard to grab an apple for the walk home... Those nights were always an adventure - one way or another.

One day I was speaking to an American friend - who was married to a German woman and who spoke fairly competent German himself - and he told me a story that was quite shocking - at least to me. He said that one evening his wife and he were taking mescaline - an hallucinogenic - and stopped to walk through the massive graveyard late in the dark hours. At some point during the trip the wife stopped by a large sculpture of an angel (I was never certain which one because there were many stone angels in the cemetery) - but he said that it was as though she fell into some sort of trance. She apparently just stood there looking up at the sculpture - seemingly frozen - and although he tried to awaken her - by voice and finally shaking her - the only thing she did was speak in a German tongue that he did not understand. He was fairly fluent in the German language too - which made that seem odd. But finally his wife came around - with no memory of what had just happened - and he told her some the things she had said while in a trance. Having been German she was familiar with some of the words - but reported that they were dead words - words that mostly had not been used in the language for a thousand years or more. It would be tantamount to you or I reading poetry form the 16th century - coming upon phraseology different from our modern English.

Anyway - and probably needless to say - as you know me - I obtained some mescaline from him and headed for that cemetery the very next evening. - joined by two single friends who also lived on post. I didn't really feel any affect from the drug - or so I thought. But at one point I remember coming upon a very old sculpture of an angel - a rather large one - with including its base it stood probably eight foot tall - and I remember looking up at it wondering if this statue was the one my friends wife had stopped at. And then suddenly - in just a second - time seemed to have changed and I heard my friends - who were by my side just a second ago - but now yelling my name clearly from the other side of the cemetery - hundreds of yards away - worried about my whereabouts - apparently not noticing that I had stopped. I don't know how much time had elapsed or that I had lost - but it was significant.

Finally - my brother and I have a friend from high school here in America who makes and sells headstones for a living. One day a few months ago he was with us as we visited our father's grave in Indianapolis and I asked him about the nature of the old stones that I found in Europe. He said yes - he was familiar with the weathering problem because long ago all headstones were made from marble, which is a much softer stone than what we use today - granite. He said granite should last for several thousand years.