I decided to walk around campus looking for rat funeral slabs - okay, just around the mall area, really. I just got a new camera - Panasonic Lumix LS70 - and I wanted to take a few pictures with it. I took a couple of long shots of the tower on Chapel Hall, and then I wandered over between Peet and the visitor center, where I found…two frisky squirrels. I’m not sure if they were just playing around or having gay sex - they both kept trying to mount each other, though I didn’t see actual humping like I did many years ago in Franklin Park. I took a bunch of pictures of the squirrels and then stumbled upon the Class of 1977’s rat funeral slab. As I was taking pictures of it, two older women came up to me and asked if the bookstore was open. I said no, it’s closed on the weekends. They wondered what I was doing, and I said I was taking pictures of the slab. One of the women said her class, 1973, had done the rat funeral but she wasn’t sure if they had a slab. She said their rats had been buried along five trees behind the audiology building. (I don’t think she realized that the building was expanded some years ago; when I went to look behind the new part, sure enough there were no five trees there.)

I walked around the mall a little more and stumbled upon slabs from the Class of 2000 and the Class of 2007. So I’ve found, and taken pictures of, three rat funeral slabs around campus. But if the tradition has been going on so long - check out the class of 1957’s photo gallery for some actual funeral pictures - there surely must be other slabs around, right? I will have to find them.