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DEATH BECOMES HIM

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By KAREN HAYMON LONG, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 1, 2007

TAMPA - One look at the streetwalking skeleton wearing a chartreuse dress, and Bob Kenison fell in love. He brought her home from Mexico and went scouting for more.

Soon, he had skeletons everywhere - all over his butter-yellow and white-trim house on a shady South Tampa street. Even at Tampa Electric Co., where he's manager of corporate credit, skeletons appear and disappear as he brings his favorites to work.

His colleagues thought they were weird at first, but now they're used to them, he says.
Kenison was introduced to the Day of the Dead skeletons in Tijuana, Mexico, where the holiday is celebrated on Nov. 1 and 2. On those days, families make pilgrimages to cemeteries to commune with their dead loved ones.

'Nov. 1 is for children and infants who die. Nov. 2 is for older ones,' says Kenison, 59, sporting one of his six Day of the Dead T-shirts, this one yellow emblazoned with a skull smoking a cigar.

A more permanent tribute is etched on his back: seven tattoos dancing from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Leading the parade, a dandy waves his hat. Strutting beside him: a rich guy, two Victorian ladies, a man walking a skeleton dog and a policeman grabbing a thief.

'They are definitely a conversation piece at the beach,' says his bemused wife, Diana, who admits to having one tattoo - of Tinkerbell.

Kenison, considering his job and all, doesn't seem the type to get hung up on skeletons. Up until the streetwalker, he collected more worldly things: Jefferson nickels, shells, rocks, barn-wood furniture, neon beer signs, jukeboxes, Hopi clown kachina dolls. You get the idea.

He can't explain his need to surround himself with Day of the Dead skeletons, those bones that always seem to be doing the stuff of earthly life: smoking, drinking, playing cards, getting married - or buried.

Besides the streetwalker, he and Diana live among four skeletons sitting around a table slugging tequila, a mermaid skeleton with a brown ponytail and a whole party of skeletons mourning their friend - a skeleton tucked inside a coffin. They range in height from a few inches to just over a foot.

He has skeleton candelabras, a skeleton bishop and a vase he paid $300 for that's adorned with skeletons. That's not all. Tiny skulls line the brown robe of a Grim Reaper skeleton that looks like a Hopi kachina doll. A skeleton man walks a skeleton dog. Bride and groom skeletons stand as if posed for a portrait.

And the spookiest of all - a skeleton with cactuses poking out of its bones flanked by skeleton vultures. Oh, and another skeleton with a disembodied leg sits at his feet.

'They're in every bedroom, the dining room, the living room - they're everywhere,' says Diana, whose own doll collection is tucked away in boxes.

She didn't know a thing about Day of the Dead until she met Bob; they've been married two years. But she learned very quickly.

'They were all over his living room.

'To each his own,' she says.

Bob says the skeletons are reminders of a life beyond this one.

'I do believe all of us are spirits when we die,' he says. 'I don't think we talk to our dead loved ones, but we feel comfort that they are there.'

Reporter Karen Haymon Long can be reached at (813) 259-7618 or klong@tampatrib.com.

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