Humiliation Averted

Many of you may know I live in Folsom, California. Many of you know of Folsom because of the Man in Black, Johnny Cash.

Folsom has been busy this year, updating old bridges and opening new ones. In a move of absolute idiocy and sheer boneheadedness, the Folsom City Council decided to name the new bridge "Folsom Lake Crossing" instead of "Johnny Cash Bridge." And of course, it wasn't the entire Council. It was one dissenting vote. (I seem to remember it was one vote that got Hitler the head of the Nazi Party, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose) Johnny Cash's family, when asked permission to use his name, had granted permission (a very rare thing for them) and were excited about the prospect of him having our bridge named after him. The landslide vote of the residents was for Johnny Cash Bridge, but no, one idiot changed all that. (I'm thinking of all the tourist dollars that got flushed down the toilet with that decision.)

So when making tombstones for my graveyard this year, I decided that since the poor man got gypped out of his bridge, the least he could get was a place in my graveyard. The foam was traced and carved with his name and dates, and I was painting everything in when I noticed something strange-day of birth and day of death were the same.

That can't be right, I thought, and looked his dates up on the computer. My instincts were right; the date was wrong, and it was my fault. I'm sure I had "12" on the brain and just didn't notice.

Johnny's tombstone is one of two real people who have tombstones in my graveyard. Since this is Folsom, someone, or many someones, may know his actual birth and death dates. And, of course, they'd tell me it was wrong. Over and over and over again.

Not an option to leave it the same and hope no one would notice. But how to fix it?

I decided the easiest way was to throw some wall patch into the offending date and let it set overnight.

I then re-traced the correct date onto the tombstone and carved it out.

I covered all the wall patch and inside the numbers with two separate coats of Dryloc, then painted it in as normal. I then finished up the tombstone as per usual (nice tea-staining on this one, too!) and I was done. Take that, well-meaning but annoying people!