We spent Thanksgiving with my grandmother in Baltimore, and it quickly became quite an eventful day. After a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, we decided it was time to act upon the family tradition; visiting a cemetery. And I don't mean to see any of our relatives. We go to cemeteries just to go. We've been doing it for as long as I can remember.
 
For a long time, the tradition never made sense to me because I never knew what I was supposed to do. Since we weren't visiting a family grave, I wasn't showing reverence for someone I used to know. Nobody told me what I was supposed to do; I was just supposed to figure it out. My mother looks for her birthday. Some of us just look at the architecture of the gravestones. As a writer, I have learned to look for names to use in my stories, and to appreciate that silent peace that only cemeteries can hold.
 
I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by their grave site. Sometimes, entire families were wiped out in sickness and buried with each other. You can see the sadness of a divided couple when a husband is buried and his wife's plot is beside him, the death year unmarked, illustrating that its only a matter of time before she will join him. Traces of visitation also say a lot about the deceased and his/her family; flowers and pictures are normal enough, but I've seen unopened cans of beer on graves before. When we went to a Jewish cemetery, we even saw rocks on a lot of the graves. We've been going to cemeteries since I was a small child, I always remember feeling bad for the people that didn't have anything on their graves; even then I understood that a grave without flowers (or some other token), a grave covered in leaves, broken and illegible gravestones meant that the deceased had been forgotten. I think my appreciation for family history comes from our tradition of visiting cemeteries. Sure, it's nothing like a family recipe, but my family has always done things their way.

I got really excited this year because I got to pick where we went. Since we were in Baltimore, I wanted to visit the grave of one of my favorite writers; Edgar Allan Poe. For me, visiting his grave was like a pilgrimage because his writing was my first encounter with canonical literature. His beautifully crafted poetry, his honest look into human psychology, inspired me to hone my own literary craft. I wanted to pay my respects to his memory, and what better way than visiting his grave on Thanksgiving?

Little did I know, the journey to downtown Baltimore City would be worthy of the father of American horror. We passed drug dealers, hustler clubs, a prostitute, and more homeless people than we could have possibly counted. We drove through housing projects, seeing for ourselves the city at its worst. When we finally reached the church at the corner of Greene and Fayette, I was ready to return to Liberalville and stay there. But I had to see the memorial. I ran down the sidewalk, crossed the street, and approached the cemetery gate. I took my pictures while my family continued down the sidewalk to the other gate to see if it was also locked. They returned with a hubcap, their "souvenir" from our adventure. We returned to the car and began our journey back to my grandmother's.

We got lost and ended up driving through some of the worst parts of the city at night. We watched a man get jumped by two guys outside of a liquor store, but we knew better than to stop. I'll admit, I'm no city girl, and I have never been so happy to see Bel Air road in all of my life. It felt like a return to civilization, but apparently that road isn't much safer because someone was shot in the 4400 block not too long ago. And every time I saw someone pass on the sidewalk, I thought oh God, are we going to be next?
 
Its hard for me to see such a broken city and not feel like there's something I should be doing to help. Seeing the desolation surrounding Poe even in death made me realize that it isn't something I can just close the book on like I could with "The Telltale Heart" or "The Black Cat." This is our world, as horrifying and beautiful as it is. And even though there are times in my life when I feel like I'm staring at a grave site waiting to happen, I cannot spend these days mourning. Nor can I spend them standing around claiming to be blessed for all that I have. I have responsibilities to leave my corner of the world in better condition than I found it.
 
I invite all of us to do the same.