It can only be attribute to fate that two, completely unrelated business conferences left me with a weekend in Miami. It’s a good thing that one of them focused on the issue of search technologies strategies, because it turns out that’s what Jay and I spent doing on the sole sunny weekend day – Sunday.


sunrise.jpg Sundays are probably good days to be looking for a graveyard. Surely the faithful, who might know the location of a graveyard, are most likely to be easily located at their places of worship?

Of course, that would assume you know how to find the places of worship in the first place. And in upscale retirement haven, Boca Raton, some two hours north of Miami along the coast, the synagogue, Catholic, Protestant and other churches are conveniently located next to the graveyard.

I’m sure you see the problem. Chicken and egg = church and cemetery.

The only devotees we could locate were sun worshipers, out doing the sensible thing on the first sunny day in days — rollerblading and heading for the beach.

Some fatherly instructions, driving the neighborhoods and questioning the citizens eventually got us to the graveyard. But no quest is ever easy. Now we had to locate Jay’s grandparents in the mausoleum.

I believe we now have a much more accurate sense of just how many people who have passed on can be efficiently honoured in a relatively modest area. A lot! And as we walked and scanned the hundreds of names, from one building to another, into one courtyard to the next, you got the horrible sense that you might be in one of those mazes and all you’ve done is gotten lost and were going in a circle.

Recollections aren’t always accurate either. They were in the courtyard to the right of the mausoleum. They were located definitely up and not lower down. It was fitting that Jay found the pair, indoors, second row from the bottom.

The search over, we paid our respects in the peaceful setting and then left to embark on a search of some urgency: the venue for a late lunch.

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