Shoulda been last weekend's blogpost.

If you use blogger.com for your blogging platform, you know that there is a dashboard where you can Six Sigma to death your blog, from a metrics perspective, to see where traffic is coming from, and a bunch of other measurements I have no idea what to do with. Anyway, the one that I do understand, Top Search Queries, shows you what words or strings of words people put into Google.com in search of something where your blog might have come up in the search results, and then those that actually went on to land on your site. All of it is pretty cool, you can figure out of someone is stalking you if they use your name and West Chester and other overly specific keywords, or you can find out who's looking for some pretty freaky times in West Chester, it all depends.

One of the things that someone evidently searched for that really intrigued me was "B-25 Crash West Chester" or something to that affect. Now it was logical that my blog might have come up, seeing as how one of my very first blogs was about how an Eclipse 500 went skidding off the end of the runway at West Chester's Brandywine airport, but this was way too specific. I clicked on the link to see the returns that my mysterious fellow googler would have seen, and I saw links referencing a monument to the men who died in a B-25 plane crash near West Chester. The monument, and from what I can gather, the plane crash site itself is located at The Oaklands Cemetery, just outside the borough.

So, as you can imagine, I took the scooter out again, and gave myself a tour of the place. Now I'm not a morbid guy, or gothy in the least bit. I will admit to listening to the Cure and to a lesser extent Morrissey and The Smiths, but I'm no Azreal Abyss, Prince of Sorrow, Chris Kattan's character from the Goth Talk sketch on SNL in the late '90s.



Yet I really like cemetery's from a historical perspective, no really! I even took a girlfriend to the cemetery (during the day, during the day) in Key West, Florida because many of the sailors that had died when the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor were buried there and there was a cool monument built for them. (How's that for nerdy eh?)

So driving around this place, and let me tell you, the hills, the trees, it's Monterey, California Deja-vu again for me or something, because it is very serene and yet also endlessly fascinating. Some of the monuments have names that are very familiar as I make my way around town, Sharpless, Matlack, Barnard, Darlington, Everhart, Route 3, (just kidding!) so it's pretty interesting all in all. One of the many "famous" people buried there is two time Medal of Honor winner Major General Smedly Darlington Butler. He was quite a character in his time, I'll let you, the faithful reader Wiki him or Google him and have you draw your own conclusions about his place in history. My two cents, he died before he could see our efforts against fascism and totalitarianism, and if he had lived perhaps his cynicism might have dimmed somewhat, but we'll never know for sure.

Well, anyway, not far into the grounds, you can't miss it, on the left hand side of the road, is this polished granite memorial for the crew of the B-25 that crashed near by in May of 1944. I think it speaks volumes about the kind of people that live in West Chester, that the members of the community would take time and money to erect a monument to people who were not even the "local boys" who went off to war, but complete strangers, who had "slipped the surly bonds of earth..." during war time, a long time ago. (Note, I hate that it bothers me, but can anyone else see something wrong with the B-25 etched in stone that depicts what the crew that was flying that fateful night?)

I suppose it would have been more poignant to have gone last Monday on Memorial Day to pay respects, but I'm glad I went today, for I had the whole place to myself, for quiet reflection, to say a prayer of thanks, and to marvel at the fact that I live here. Such a great place I swear if you locals ever take it for granted that you live here, I'll remind you from time to time how good you've got it, ok?