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| Deluxe Town Diner |
Yesterday we had a late lunch at
the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown,
one of our favorite places for an outstanding breakfast as well as for casual
dining the rest of the day. The food is
better than standard diner fare and what other place has an entire menu just
for tea?
Then we went for a long walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery. That may sound morbid but Mount Auburn was
founded in 1831 as the nation’s first garden cemetery, replacing the old,
overcrowded, city churchyards. It was
designed for the living to enjoy as much as for interment of the deceased. The 174 acres of
rolling, beautifully landscaped terrain are planted with many varieties of
trees and shrubs as well as flowers. All
the trees and most of the shrubs are marked with their Latin and common names (i.e.,
Acer Saccharum, Sugar Maple) for easy
identification and all the roads and lanes are named after plant life (i.e., Kalmia
Lane, Primrose Path). On any pleasant
weekend, it is crowded with people walking, pushing strollers, running, birdwatching,
and taking photographs among its lakes and hills. People even take wedding photographs
here.
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| Looking Across a Lake |
Yesterday we saw mostly bulbs
(crocus, snowdrops, and scilla) in bloom as well as one wildly optimistic
azalea and a few andromedas. In places, there were carpets of vibrant purple scilla and white snowdrops. Even though
the weather has been cold, buds on the trees were swelling, giving a hazy green
and pink aura to some of the landscape. The
waterfowl had returned to the lakes but we didn’t see any hawks or herons,
which are commonly spotted here.
Among the 93,000 people buried in Mount
Auburn are nearly 200 notables
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
And because Boston and Cambridge were much smaller cities when the cemetery
was opened, you can be sure than anyone with a familiar-sounding name was
related to the more famous person is some way. Visitors can pick up a map at the front gate (a
massive Egyptian Revival structure) that shows the locations of plots where
famous people are buried so you can go on a scavenger hunt of sorts, trying to
find your favorite writer, artist, historical figure, or politician.
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| Mary Baker Eddy |
While there may be equality in
death, there certainly is not in the memorials raised for these folks. Winslow
Homer, for example, is just one name on a large but undistinguished family
stone. It’s plain gray granite, which seems
like a cruel joke for someone whose whole life was based on the beautiful use
of color. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has his own simple marker but Mary
Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science church, rates a Greek temple
on the shore of a lake.
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| Buddhist Stupa |
Mount Auburn is also a sculpture garden, with
statuary designed by the likes of Augustus
St. Gaudens, and a Civil War memorial that is a full-size granite Sphinx. The
Washington Tower gives a panoramic view of Boston and Cambridge if you climb
its fairly dim and echoing spiral staircase to the top. Not all of the structures are historical,
though. This Buddhist stupa was raised in 2010
in place of a tombstone. I only wish we
could have read the prayers on the plinth.
Over an hour of walking helped us
burn off some of the calories we ate earlier (great cherry pie) and we headed home tired but
happy. The burial service in the Book of
Common Prayer says, “In the midst of life we are in death.” At Mount
Auburn Cemetery, death is surrounded by life—the new life of growing things
reaching toward the spring sun, the returning life of birds migrating north and
turtles emerging from hibernation, and the ongoing life of people who come out to
enjoy such a beautiful place.
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