Highgate

There used to be a cemetery by my dorm at UVa, and occasionally we’d walk through there in the evenings. T’was calm. And so I went to another today. Getting places is always a bit of a challenge for me. But in London when the directions ask you to walk up Highgate Hill to Waterlow Park and onto Swain's Lane, you actually do go up a steep hill into a green park and past a stream with swans in them. For map-barbarians like me, this look-and-feel nomenclature is helpful. So I found myself without any mishaps at a sign that called the cemetery ‘London’s most magical place’. Curious. It’s sylvan [see ode on a Grecian urn] with burial stones from the 1500s to now. The older ones moss-laden. Epithets in Olde English. Newer ones in Arabic and an assortment of East Asian languages. All for beloved wives and husbands and fathers and mothers. And a very few others around strolling among these signs of affection that exist everywhere but are so rarely written to be seen, permanently. I love you.

And then out of nowhere I suddenly stood before a gargantuan stone with a big headed man. "Workers of all lands, unite!" I stood before Marx, momentarily awed, and then I scuttled back home.

http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/