I was born in 1952, in a section of the Bronx where it's now easier to get an ounce of crack than a newspaper or a taxi. My brother Eric arrived when I was two, and, growing family that we'd become, Mom and Dad decided to borrow some money and slap a down payment on a three-bedroom ranch house out on Long Island. One of my very first memories is sitting in the back seat of Grandpa's Ford, eating spaghetti out of a Thermos bottle and staring at our new house across the thirty feet of bright, brown dirt that was our future front lawn.

The town we had moved to was called Wantagh. The name, like those of many other towns and villages on the Island, was of Native American origin. I've never determined its precise interpretation, although someone once told me that, roughly translated, it meant "By the Mall." Sounded good then. Sounds good now.

Wantagh is sandwiched between the ticky-tacky boxes of Levittown and the surfboards and boomboxes of Jones Beach. Also of notoriety, at least to the locals, was a combination animal hospital, dog pound, and pet cemetery called Bide-a-Wee (another name I've never quite figured out). When I was in high school, the cemetery had the reputation of being one of the more exotic places a guy could go on a Friday night to get drunk, stoned, or into his girlfriend's pants. The fence around it was a cinch to climb, and the ambiance had just the right amount of post-pubescent cache. Plus, it was rumored that Checkers (Nixon's dog, star of the famous speech) was buried there.

Unfortunately, Bide-a-Wee was located directly across the street from a rival high school, and was thus considered off-limits to us for our drinking, smoking, and fucking, unless we also wanted to fight. So I never really got to see the place until I was well out of high school, and college too, for that matter. In fact, it wasn't until I had just finished graduate school and had moved back in with my parents for the summer (the idea being to coast for a few months, until I was able to figure out how to make a living as an "art" photographer), that I actually managed, one blistering June day, to visit the place.

The rumors, as it turned out, were true. Checkers was buried there. I was surprised at how plain his headstone was, compared to some of the other residents. As for the cemetery itself, it seemed like a pretty classy joint, considering it was for non-humans. Many of the markers were inlaid with photos of the departed, printed on porcelain--the kind you'd find in Eastern European cemeteries. Entire poems, long poignant laments, were carved into the facades of numerous stones. Some mourners had carefully placed their pet's favorite toys around the grave: balls, rawhide bones, rubber mice, stuffed animals with the stuffing chewed or clawed out, bleached and fragile from the sun and rain. This place, I figured, was worth a few photographs.

So picture me, bent over a gravestone (it was a Siberian Husky's, I think), trying to focus, when I hear this truck rumble by. A man's voice calls out "Hey! What're you doing?! Is that your dog?" Uh-oh...must be the grounds crew. Maybe I'm not allowed to take pictures here. "Yeah," I answer. "He was mine." I turn around. By now the truck has gone; a cloud of dirt drifts in its place. The voice I heard came from an elderly man standing about three graves away. He's wearing brown polyester slacks and a white belt. In front of him is a freshly dug cavity in the earth, about three feet by four feet by another four or five feet deep. We get to talking.

Clearly this geezer is not on the cemetery staff. His dog died, he tells me, and they'd just finished the funeral. He's waiting for his wife and daughter to bring the casket out from the chapel so they can bury it.

"I'm sorry," I say.
"Yeah. He was a good dog. Fourteen years. When did yours die?"
I lower my head and sneak a quick peek at the date on the headstone.
"1954."
"Been coming here ever since, have you?"
"Oh yeah."

My folks still live in Wantagh, in the house they bought forty-two years ago. Every once in a while, when I go back to visit, I'll stop off at Bide-a-Wee, to see what's changed from the last time. I still manage to find a few pictures to make.

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