Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Healing and Meditative Landscape | Page 19

were brothers-in-law, buried together in their wives’ family
plot. I laughed aloud when I discovered the architectural
one-two punch of Buckminster Fuller’s final resting place,
so close to his distinguished predecessor, Charles Bullfinch.
I happily give Mount Auburn tours to my friends, visiting
my best-loved discoveries: my favorite Civil War memorial
(Joseph S. Hills), my favorite husband-and-wife markers
(Juliet and Gyorgy Kepes), my favorite epitaph in verse
(David McCord). I love visiting the places where I find
offerings made to the deceased: Lincoln pennies gifted to
abolitionist Charles Sumner, for instance, and seashells to
Winslow Homer. I delight in the image of Roxbury fami-
lies transporting their local puddingstone conglomerates
to mark their passage, and I mourn the heartbreak of the
WWI flying hero who died in Europe just 48 hours before
the Armistice. I’m always happy when I find famous graves
by accident—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Dorothea Dix, and
most recently, the voice of the Red Sox of my youth, Curt
Gowdy. Bless the visitors who placed baseballs on his grave,
or