November 1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We actually had a lovely night with a steady succession of trick-or-treating families coming to the door: all happy and excited and exceedingly polite (while low-flying helicopters circled overhead, continuously). Halloween night is always a small compensation for the month of Halloween celebrations that we endure here in Salem, at least for me. During the day, I walked over to the Salem Witch Trials Memorial on Charter Street because I wanted to see how the site was affected by the limitation of visitors to the adjacent Old Burying Ground. Just last week, the city announced that the cemetery would be limited to 100 people at a time, a policy that was was heralded in a Boston Globe article with the great title: “Salem to Visitors: Don’t Change Diapers and Eat Ice Cream on Gravestones”. The cemetery is really part of the Memorial in the sense that the gravestones of the latter bear silent witness to the cenotaphs of the latter, so diaper-changing and ice cream-eating tourists give the message: we don’t care what happened to those people in 1692. A less carnival-esque atmosphere next door would give the opposite message presumably. During my half-hour on Charter Street (bear in mind this was a Tuesday, not a Saturday) I did see a much more solemn cemetery, but the carnival was still going on within the Memorial, including: ice-cream eating tourists sitting on the bench-cenotaphs, a large tour group, three staged photo opportunities (all of which involved sitting on the cenotaphs or wall behind), and a wedding (after which all the people in the adjacent tour group clapped enthusiastically, of course). All in 30 minutes, no more.