Sunday night we drove up to Sleepy Hollow, New York to partake in a lantern-guided nighttime tour of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It sounds rather morbid now that I put it into writing, but it was a Halloween thing and we thought it would be in the spirit of Halloween, pardon the pun, which it was.

The tour brought us to the graves of many names that you would know like Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the Rockefellers, and Andrew Carnegie. And then there were people we had never heard of like the Listers, who had a successful business manufacturing buttons out of animal bones, in Newark, NJ or John Achbold who was archenemies with John Rockefeller and then ended up being his right-hand man. We learned a lot about people and how they behaved. Some were revered and others detested. Some had massive crypts and others nondescript headstones, but they all had a story.

We are all still “writing” our stories. I don’t know that any of the people in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery considered that their story would be told many years later in a moonlit cemetery. What do you want to be a part of your story, regardless of whether or not it’s told publicly? Someone is going to say, “He was the guy who…”. This question isn’t about the end of that sentence being, “invented the railroad,” or “cured cancer.” It’s all about the little things like were we as nice as we could have been? Where we kind when it mattered? Were we happy? Did we make a positive impact somehow? Andrew Carnegie was not nice—and then he was. Just a thought.

Let’s GO! WE GOT THIS!

Beth