By Yolande Robbins

To the immense joy and delight of their friends on The Beulah Cemetery Restoration Committee, Mark McCann announced his marriage to the loveliest lady with the most enviable reputation that you could imagine.

No, I’m not going to tell you her name, other than Mrs. McCann, but she’s long since become an essential part of us at our meetings and parties and even at the cemetery.

Yes, she’s come many times with Mark to see and share in his work, meet his friends, and just walk in that history.

How many women do you know who’ve had a date in the cemetery?

Not me, and my daddy was an “undertaker!”

But eager to share in his passion for the place and his unrelenting work in it, she came and is now one of us.

Mark himself had come to us through Sheriff Pace, who knew him and said we ought to get to know him. And we did when he came to Beulah for the first time to accompany the sheriff who was going to sing there. And Mark came with his guitar.

Then offered to stay and help us. And has been with us ever since.

Mark works for Entergy and with Entergy volunteers who are the best on the planet. And they did things for us we could never do ourselves, never even thought about trying to do. Later he introduced me to his friends and took me back to where “Harvey Kilowatt” and his friends from MP&L (in the ‘50s) still hang out! Down ’61 and west.

And we all just hung out there and talked. It was wonderful!

But Mark is a craftsman, and much more than an electrician. He’s a genuine renaissance man.  Of the earth and an artist as well! He can make music and sing! Really good too!

Once, while my back was turned, he sat down at my piano, and I nearly forgot where I was, — at home, at the funeral home, at my home, and I nearly forgot where I was.

He’s that good!

And all of us have come to rely on him.

He’s worked his connections for us and, as a result, Entergy’s giving us a cost-free electrical grid to power a kiosk at the cemetery. That lighting and kiosk will enable a ready location and identification of all who are buried in Beulah.

He brings us his tiller-tractor too and plows the ground for our garden each year.

Oh that we all could have friends like that!

The French philosopher and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, is remembered for saying that “Everything that rises must converge.” Eventually, he believed, we all bend toward each other. We don’t rise in parallel lines.

So it’s no wonder that Mark married well.

You get the impression they’re each other’s best friend!

So, raise your glasses, Vicksburg, to the new Mr. and Mrs. McCann.

We don’t find people like them every day.

Yolande Robbins is a community correspondent for The Post. Email her at  yolanderobbins@fastmail.com