We bought our house in downtown New Albany in 2003, and by the following spring casual neighborhood walks had become a regular weekend feature of our lives.
It can be stated with near certainty that the vicinity has improved since then, although this is another consideration for a different diary entry.
New Albany’s Fairview Cemetery, which dates to 1841, lies only a few blocks from the house, and very early during our strolls through the cemetery I noticed the tombstone of the Sladeks — and the omission of a death date for Charles.
At first I joked that Charles W. Sladek, born in 1888, evidently was a vampire, except that Sladek is no Transylvanian surname.
I know very few words in the Czech language, but one of them is slad (malt). Another is sládek, meaning a maltster or brewer (or both); sladař and sladovník also are words for maltster, but since there was a time when the b ......
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