Rose Shadows and Cowpox

All aboard the S. S. Sleeper! She sails tonight. Or perhaps tomorrow, or in the next century or so. Very, very slowly.

There are so many lovely and poignant moments in a walk through Mount Auburn, it's hard to pick favorites. Here's a monument to a man lost at sea. I liked the verse. It's about the lack of closure that goes with such a tragic event:

He sleeps beneath the blue lazy sea

He lies where pearls lie deep

He was the loved of all, yet none

O'er his low bed may weep.

Everywhere, you see graven evidence of people searching for closure, for a way to be at peace with losing the ones they love. It's hardest, perhaps, for people who lose young children, but there was a terrible lot of that going around in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Influenza epidemics, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever...they took an awful toll.

I could hardly look at this little sculpture of two children sleeping, imagining the loss behind it,

for they were often lost in twos and threes as an epidemic swept through a household. The idea of such a thing happening today is very remote to us, but was very real then.

Climbing roses, planted so many decades later, cast a beautiful shadow, a shadow of remembrance and sorrow, and life blooming perhaps again, somewhere.

And here is the grave of someone who did something about it all. Benjamin Waterhouse, of Harvard College, introduced to the United States a vaccine for the devastating disease of smallpox. English physician Edward Jenner had noted that milkmaids seemed to have an immunity to smallpox, and went from there. He hypothesized that their exposure, in the course of their work, to the biologically similar cowpox virus armed their immune systems against the human variant of this horrid virus. My father loved to tell us about Jenner, as a way of telling us that we must notice things, connect things that seem unconnected, and thereby do much good. (Thanks to Tim who gracefully and quietly corrects the S.S. Sleeper's course from time to time).

Waterhouse's stone reads:

In 1800 he introduced to the New World 

the blessing of vaccination,

overcame popular prejudice and distrust

by testing it on his own children,

and thus established a title 

to the gratitude of future ages.

This memorial was erected by his wife, who doubtless appreciated more than anyone the sacrifice he'd made in testing it on their own children.

But I'm getting too ponderous; these stones haunt me. So I'll leave you with the monument Kris calls 

The Celestial Wedgie. Ow! Lemme go!

Great Trees of Mount Auburn

There are, of course, the trees to consider. Mount Auburn Cemetery has the grandest, most diverse, sometimes most bizarre trees...trees as varied as its monuments.

It was on my October walk with Kris that I first realized that weeping beeches must be grafted. A plant with the "weeping" mutation grows downward, or prostrate. How does a tree that grows downward instead of up ever attain any height? Wouldn't it just crawl along the ground? Well, apparently it would, unless the weeping branch is grafted, oh so very long ago, to an upright or standard trunk. Imagine being a normal beech sapling, minding your own bidness, growing straight up, then suddenly chopped off and topped with dreadlocks.

And here is the scar to show where it was grafted. Amazing. Mount Auburn is a place of reflection, wonder, and discovery for me. In looking at this scar, I suddenly made the connection with those rather ridiculous looking little weeping cherry trees everyone plants in front of their new condos--you know...the yardstick with the big foof of weeping pink-flowering branches atop it. They look like frothy pink umbrellas. Weeping beech: same deal. But much more impressive, especially given a couple hundred years. I enjoy discovering the hand of man where I'd never thought to look for it.

Each of these weeping beeches is like a citadel of privacy, especially in growing season when their leaves form a curtain all around. You push aside the long trailing fronds and enter a greengold world. I can only imagine what has gone on under these trees all these years. Lots of carving, apparently...and who knows what else. 

Speaking of trees, we found a swarm of feral honeybees in a big hollow oak. Nice to see, rather rare.  You can just pick out their golden dots in the round cavity. What a magnificent tree this was, and full of bees, too.

 Oh the trees, the beautiful trees. Things weren't really turning color just yet in the warm and protected city environs. It's so easy to forget the headstones and just appreciate the forest here. That's what the birds do. They drop into Mount Auburn like tired pebbles on their long spring and fall migratory flights, and they find what they need in her thickets and shrubbery, in the sunlit canopy of her massive trees.

I come here to appreciate truly mature trees. We plant them in our yards when they're barely bigger than we are, and we so easily underestimate the real estate they'll carve out when they're full grown. We may never see them full-grown, in fact. That's for our children's children.

 And just like in a forest, the trees are always replicating themselves. I don't know if the cemetery management wants another huge oak here, but these acorns aren't daunted. They're going to give it a go.

It is the contrast of burgeoning life with memento mori all around that brings me back to Mount Auburn Cemetery again and again. I could live here, mining her secrets and wonders, for years and never uncover them all.

Mt Auburn Cemetery: Laughing at Funerals 3

Styles in epitaphs are as varied as the careers and worldviews of the interred. Kris, ever irreverent in her reverence, delights in showing me the ones who got a bit carried away as they were being carried away.

Give me the most complex Celtic cross you can carve. Really pull out the stops on this one. Hang the expense.  I happen to love its complexity. But there's also something kind of painful about the font. I imagine chiseling it all out of granite and it makes me sigh.

 There are graven resumes everywhere. Now, I have held a few jobs for one or two years, but I'm not going to commit them to marble. Wow. Seems to me Mr. Everett bounced around a bit. All right, he bounced in high places. But he still bounced. President of this, professor of that, minister of this, senator of that.

I wish you could hear Kris' helpless laughter as she shows me this one. I know it's hard to read, so here's what it says:

"An eminent American Inventor

whose great mind conceived

ideas and brought into operation

works of art that will live for ages."

Which is not, in itself, that funny until you walk around the stone and see the carved depictions of his works of art.

No explanation needed, apparently; we'll all know what that is. For ages.

 And that? Oh, there's one in every...shoe factory? I don't know why this delights me and Kris so, but it does. No disrespect to Thomas Blanchard or his descendants intended, but this monument cracks us up.

 As does this one, which I call LEMME OUT TEBBETTS!! I think they're trying to prevent noselessness here, protecting it from acid rain, but it's just sooo creepy to see Mr. Tebbetts fogging up the Plexiglas with his cold breath.

Stones of Mount Auburn

By no means are all of Mount Auburn Cemetery's stones perfect. Some, with all apologies to the interred, are perfectly hideous.

I don't know what the hot cross buns of stone are meant to represent, but I'm missing it.  Poor Sister. Just a hop-skip away from the elegant ammonite. I am so designing my own headstone. 

Kris and I looked long and hard for the metamorphosis stone she'd found and saved to show me. I was a little crestfallen to find the butterfly and caterpillar clearly rendered innocent of any reference to their true appearance. Still, a nice concept, even if the larva's prolegs and adult's segmentation and wing overlap are all so, so wrong. Being a Science Chimp can seriously get in the way of appreciating such things. Mostly, it enhances, but sometimes it hinders.

I was delighted to find this stone on the ridge near Spectacle Pond, where I saw my first of a lifetime of great binocular-fuls. It was a May morning, probably 1978. I was focused on my first-ever (life, in bird parlance) summer tanager, an orangey-green immature male with patches of red molting in. I was already hyperventilating when a male ruby-throated hummingbird flew into the scene and stabbed at the young tanager. Little did I know one day I'd live where summer tanagers sing lazily as they masticate yellowjackets in late June; where I'd have to swat the hummingbirds away to get in the front door. I felt my life was complete with that one vision; didn't know it could get any better. 

That's living in the moment.

Some stones are heart-grippingly beautiful in their simplicity and hidden meaning. I took an introductory humanities course with William Alfred, and this tabula mysteriosa is perfect. It's perched unprepossessingly on the flank of "Harvard Hill," where the University's nearest and dearest rest. Kris found that, too, when she found our beloved former Dean Archie Epps' stone, and noticed that everyone around him had a connection to Harvard.

 Kris remarked as we marveled that she had never seen God described as a deep but dazzling darkness--isn't He supposed to be the Light?-- anywhere but on Alfred's stone. Oh, the sun blowing its celestial trumpet, eyes crossed in effort! And that banner: DEATH IS UNDONE BY LOVE

Well, if you've ever lost someone who lives in your heart and thoughts every single day (DOD) what can you do but wipe your eyes at that?

 William Alfred, who left us in 1999, just as my bright spirit Liam entered. I like his choice of "Teacher" instead of "Professor."

For those who have trouble deciphering, it says:

There is in God (some say)

 A deep but dazzling darkness-

O for that night! where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

Right up there with my favorite stones in this magical place.

There is the stone of a woman who was a book illustrator in the 1960's--so clearly indicated by the stylized birds that dance across her slate. Very Leonard Baskin, by my appraisal. Very beautiful. It overlooks Spectacle Pond, where I first heard the burbling song of a ruby-crowned kinglet.

Birds are everywhere in Mount Auburn; this is why I first came here, to watch them. I could barely see the stones for the warblers, vireos and tanagers.  Now, having seen a surfeit of birds, I still come here for them, and everything. 

Oh look. Who's been here?

Last spring's robin, of course. A robin would do that.