Cemeteries do not creep me out. These days, visiting one cemetery in particular is like “Old Home Week.”

Oh, I can think of places I would rather be on dark and stormy nights amid shadowy monuments when tree leaves flail in tempo with the eerie moans of the howling wind.

But I feel quite at home in cemeteries in general and St. Joseph’s Catholic cemetery in my native town of Warren in particular.

Last week’s visit was done in broad daylight while sunshine was dappling ground dampened by frequent rain showers. But I have been in cemeteries, including that one, well past the onset of darkness. I even spent part of a summer as a teenager mowing grass there with non-motorized reel mowers.

We flirted with chewing tobacco during that time. I am ashamed to admit that, as we raced our mowers through the grass, we attempted to spit streams of tobacco juice at tombstones. Happily, our aim was not good. Also, those reel mowers would get clogged and stop suddenly as we ran, shoving our chests and stomachs against the wooden handles with swallow-the-chaw force. One gulp, down and back up, cured me of the chew/snuff habit.

I probably went to the cemetery as a toddler. Funeral rites in the 1940s combined aspects of a wake with family/neighborhood reunions. My earliest memory is of 1951, when Grandma Critelli, my mother’s mother, died. That was followed in 1952 by Grandpa Bonavita, then in 1954 by Uncle Tim, in 1956 by Dad and Grandma Bonavita and in 1959 by Grandpa Critelli. In between, there were deaths of neighbors, of parents of schoolmates, and of cousins, etc.

My memories are mingled through the sieves of handed-down family tales and legends, but one thing sticks out in particular: The Memorial Day masses held outdoors at the cemetery. I attended some with Mom, others as a Boy Scout. I remember the shattering auditory slap of the volleys of rifles fired in salutes to the military veterans. Back then, and until 1967, the day was “Decoration Day.”

What I remember most is the walk up the hillside after the service.

A day or two earlier, Mom and I would have planted flowers at Dad’s grave and at the graves of her mother, her sister and her 90-day-old baby brother Luigi.

The trudge up the hill was taken by, as I recall, hundreds of people who stopped at their own family plots, then wandered around to see who else had been respectful to the dead, and who had been neglectful. A few poor posies drew tut-tutts, while bright bouquets or plantings drew murmurs of approval.

At the gravesites, there was howling.

Well, there was! At least, I remember it as howling. Almost always in Italian, it was a cacophony of dirges that served two purposes. One was to show that the survivors still grieved over the losses of their parents, spouses, children, etc. The second purpose, never spoken out loud, was to show the other howlers that, indeed, the Bruno family could out-howl the Bianchi family (names changed to protect the descendants).

This went on, year after year, for decades.

In the process, cemeteries lost their strangeness and macabre overtones for me. Going there was just like going to the grocery store, or anywhere else “over town.”

Last week’s visit, then, was a tribute and renewal to the memories of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. It also hit me with a jolt as I walked among the stones that as I approach my 75th birthday, I know more of the people who are interred in the cemetery than l know who still live in the town below that hillside.

That, too, is fitting.

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In last week’s column, I suggested that President Trump ought to get government off the backs of ordinary Americans: Give us gas cans that pour rather than be equipped with complex safety devices; allow riding mowers to operate in reverse and, for that matter, at non-governored speeds; break up Big Banks, Big Business and Big Beer; and get the Internal Revenue Service out of the business of monitoring our bank withdrawals.

Astute readers pointed out that Trump, born to a billionaire and himself a mega-billionaire, has probably never poured gasoline into a mower, mowed for hours on end, had hassles with big businesses or worried about withdrawing cash; he has “people” to do those things for him.

True enough. So we need to educate the President about the lives of ordinary people. I sent that column to Trump at the White House. Amazingly, there has not yet been a Tweeted response! Perhaps that is because I am a registered Libertarian.

So you, dear readers, must carry this burden, to educate President Trump and, next year, to — dare I say it — replace incumbents in the federal House and Senate who refuse to get government off our backs.

I did my part.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.