Day 10 A Grave Disappearance

Day 10 March 11, 2008

     Today starts with a quick trip back to the high school track for my biweekly speed workout (see Day 8).  Biweekly is ambiguous.  It can mean either twice a week or every two weeks.  Bimonthly has same the double definition (bi-finition?).  But biannual only means twice a year.  The spelling is changed to biennial to mean every other year.  My second speed workout here this week leaves me bye-weakly.

     Trying to pick up a few new blocks on my way home, I run down Argyle Road and cut over to Windermere Avenue and cross Garrett Road.  I turn left onto Marshall Road.  This street is the border with East Landsdowne borough, which has a great oak tree logo.  On the wall of neat little Mar-Win supermarket, it is proudly displayed on a welcome mural .  I have logo envy.

     Across from the Mar-Win is a row of shops.  The Tai Sheng has great chinese takeout.  I put “tai sheng” into three different online translators and they all say that  in English it means “tai sheng”.  I never knew that I could speak Chinese.  At the end of the row is the Soji Zen Center.  I go to yoga class and meditation here.  I always say that I’m a bad but loyal member of every group that I join.  I’m still stiff, physically and mentally, so my truism also holds here.

     I run down the township border on Marshall Road for almost a mile and turn left onto Sherbrook Boulevard.  At the corner of the bus pullout there is a flight of concrete stairs that goes uphill between the back of West Lumber Company and an apartment building.  At the top is a small, triangular shaped field.  My wife and I were once trying to figure out where an old photograph was taken in Upper Darby.  It showed an old towering gravestone with a view of Beverly Hills Middle School from the rear.  After driving around and searching fruitlessly in the Marshall Road athletic fields, we discovered this patch of ground.  An old man walking his dog confirmed that he had witnessed the relocation of a cemetery in 1965.  A web search revealed that here once stood a New Jerusalem Church with a Swedenborgian graveyard.  The gentleman remembered seeing the coffins lifted by a crane out of the ground and loaded onto a truck.  Although the bodies have been moved, a vague uneasiness lingers about the rectangular depressions still visible in the ground.  I wouldn’t visit here at night, certainly not when there is a full moon, and never on Halloween.

Distance:   3.97 miles Time:   38 min 20 sec   Pace:   9:40 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1690357