GoElvis.com,

We were standing by Elvis Presley’s grave.

“Do you remember where you were when you heard he was dead?” I asked, pen poised over my notebook.

Her name was Laura Pomeroy. She was 37, from La Crosse, Wisc., and this was her second visit to Memphis.

“Uh huh,” she nodded. “I was in 11th grade, in Galesville, Wisconsin, and…” Suddenly, her lips pursed, her face turned red.

“It shoulda never happened,” she choked, and the tears rolled freely.

“I understand,” I said softly, “take your time,” and while she took her time, I marveled at how familiar her tears seemed.

In the past seven years, I’ve talked with beer-bellied Ernest Hemingway lookalikes in Key West, and I’ve mingled with overweight women at a fat people’s convention in Fort Lauderdale. I’ve joined a car full of Wayne Newton fans, and marched with Civil War buffs on the site of Florida’s largest battle. A month before heading for Graceland, I was out in Roswell, N.M., talking with people who believe a flying saucer crashed there 50 years ago.

Sometimes, when strangers ask, I tell them I cover pilgrimages.

Back in September 1990, I’d stood by another grave, in Fairmount, Ind.

Pen poised, notebook in hand, I waited while a grown man named Lyman Wickwire crouched in the grass before James B. Dean, 1931-1955, and cried even louder than Laura Pomeroy at Graceland.

“So much of my life has been involved with this man,” he blubbered. “Jimmy gave the people who weren’t in power permission to ask questions of those who were. I’m a Vietnam vet, so I’ve had to ask a lot of questions. I’m 48.”

Earlier that summer, in Key West, I’d searched in vain for an Ernest Hemingway lookalike who had actually read some of Hemingway’s books. Afterwards, I realized they weren’t really looking for literature, but a drinking buddy who’s bigger than life.

At the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance convention in 1991, I met Cyndy Franklin, one of the group’s 3,000 members.

“We’ve had neighbors who wouldn’t speak,” she said in a voice that pierced me with its anger and pain.

Some pilgrims mourn a single celebrity. Some mourn thousands of faceless heroes.

Every Feb. 20, the Olustee State Historic Site west of Jacksonville welcomes several hundred men in Civil War uniforms, gathered to re-enact the 1864 battle where 2,000 died.

“Those boys were really afraid they’d die somewhere and be forgotten,” said Al Hamilton, an Amoco employee from Marietta, Ga., as we talked by his campfire. “We are memorializing here,” he went on, and suddenly his eyes, too, welled with tears. “We aren’t trivializing anything.”

By November 1994, when I traveled to Melbourne, Fla., with some local Wayniacs for a concert by their hero, Wayne Newton, I’d learned something worth remembering. Or at least I like to think so.

If you want to learn tolerance, don’t worry too much about the objects of other people’s devotion - try to honor the devotion itself.

After all, you don’t have to like Wayne Newton’s music to like the look in a true fan’s face while she listens.

Maybe those few UFO believers who came to Roswell in July were the purest pilgrims of all. They had come seeking only some reassurance that, as their T-shirts said, “We are not alone.”

The easy intimacy with which these pilgrims talk about their heroes never fails to touch me.

Lyman Wickwire called James Dean ‘Jimmy,’ as if they’d been the best of friends one time. At Graceland, the first man in line to carry a candle past Elvis’s grave wore a T-shirt that said, “Old friend, I’m missing you once again.” At Olustee, the men in make-believe blue and gray were remembering others they had never known, as if they had known them.

I guess we want to believe our heroes would recognize something of themselves in us, as we have found something of ourselves in them.

I guess all of us want to nudge up next to something bigger, better and more purposeful than ourselves. We want to feel we have something in common with those who have sung lovely songs, written great books, fought worthy fights and dreamed great dreams.

In Memphis, after I’d finished my Elvis story, I drove downtown to the former Lorraine Motel, left my pen and notebook in the car, and stood for a while in the parking lot, looking up at the balcony where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died.

It shoulda never happened.