King of the road

This is a bit better, obviously a repeat of yesterday. This heat was rising from the road in waves and that fades the original somewhat.

I tried to encourage my 16-year-old to stand by this bison -- what a picture that would have been! But he was uncharacteristically reticent (my son, that is). But he is a generous lad; he offered to take a picture of me sitting on the bison's back. I was concerned that some folks might think I was being cruel to the bison, although if my son continued taking pictures and watched the bison stomping my body for a bit, that might have mitigated concern of animal cruelty. There were about a dozen bison in this group.

I have to be careful; I took hundreds of pictures. But I have a warning light that goes off in my addlepated memory. When I was a freshman in college, I joined the choir and we travelled in the spring break. One night two of us were staying with this family who had a bunch of friends over and were showing slides of their trip to Mexico. These folks had not deleted any picture they took, and they took a lot. I remember seeing eight slides from varying distances of the entrance to a Mexican cemetary. When I noticed that my roomie Maury had fallen asleep, we bowed out, claiming it was a long day (not true.)

"Cemetary," by the way, is distinctly Christian in the origins of the way we use it. It is etymologically identical to the French "dormitory." Early Christians did not like "necropolis" (city of the dead), so they took the available equivalent of the place for sleep and applied it to the graveyard, thinking of the words about Lazarus, among others, "He is not dead, only sleeping."