Joe has written several family stories on subjects such as Grits, Serbian history (the Dacovich's came from Yugoslavia/Austria) , and music. A sample of his writing is a family story on the herb, Rosemary, which follows.
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There's rosemary, that's for remembrance;
Pray, love, remember;
And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.
Hamlet, Act. 4, Scene 5

An old saying is that daisies never tell, and lovers of Shakespeare's plays doubtless will remember
Ophelia's poignant love complaint in Hamlet that pansies are for thoughts and rosemary is for
remembrance.

All this submerged wisdom about flowers suddenly came back to me the other afternoon when my
brother, Graham, and I were talking on long distance telephone about the Dacovich burial plot in
Mobile's Catholic Cemetery. Originally, this space was reserved for the Dacovich family, and I believe that name is still chiseled in stone on one of the markings. But my father's two older sisters married cousins named McGuire, and throughout the years so many McGuires have been buried here that is might now properly be called the McGuire lot.

After I finished my conversation with my brother, I recalled that in the old days my father would often drive across Three Mile Creek and return again to this old burial ground whenever he needed a sprig of rosemary to enhance his leg of lamb roast. Rosemary had long grown on this spot since time
immemorial, and as rosemary traditionally is for remembrance, a graveyard certainly was an ideal
place for such a herb to thrive.

Without doubt, the rosemary has long died out by now, but in the 1930's it was still alive and
flourishing. In any event, my sister, Mary, never cared much for Daddy flavoring his lamb roast with rosemary that came from a cemetery because the superstitious side of her always made her think that plants from such a place might bring us all bad luck.

Too bad, though, there weren't any daisies there, as there are always thoughts about the dead that,
mercifully, ought never to be told. And one might also draw some philosophical conclusions about the absence of pansies and other floral embellishments, for as Wordsworth wrote so plaintively in his great immortality ode,

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Joseph Dacovich
July 2000
Quincy, IL