Saw a swan during my run today. Reminded me of two things. The first, was the swan that got rather annoyed at us on the upper Thames when we didn't have anything to give to it. We had been wandering around Oxford one afternoon, when we turned down a publicway that followed the river upstream. Unlike the annoyed swan, we found a friendly innkeeper at the end, who gladly served us a couple of pints at an inn/pub in the middle of nowhere (you couldn't actually see any other buildings from the pub lawn) and we played a game of lawn chess...that Dwayne won of course! It was one of those cool in-the-moment kind of things that happens sometimes when you travel...no specific destination, no sight that you're determined to see, but just taking things as they come.

After I had passed the swan, it also occurred to me that it was only a stone's throw across the river that Dwayne & I saw a fox the week before. We had both been to the Mount Auburn cemetary separately, and I at least, hadn't really been through much of it, but we walked over the other afternoon and looked around. The place is huge..over 100 acres...and there are maps that show you where all the famous people are buried. We checked out Harriet Jacobs and Longfellow's tombs...Longfellow's was of course much fancier...though Jacobs was nicer than B.F. Skinner's (behavioral psychologist). We were trying to find Skinner's grave, but the area it was supposed to be in was one that only had the small ground level markers...Dwayne kept insisting that it must be somewhere else, 'cause this was B.F. Skinner, he was important, and he should have a big headstone. I told him I figured we were in the right place, where the smallest memorials were, since Skinner was, after all, an academic. Sure enough, it was a rather unimpressive marker! And this is what I'm getting myself into! There were plenty of other notables, including Buckminster Fuller (physicist) and Colonel Shaw (the one who was played by Matthew Broderick in Glory), but we limited outselves only to a few since we wanted to spend time at the tower.

In the center of the graveyard lies a tall hill, and on the crest of the hill is a tower. From it's height, you can see probably half (the north half) or the greater Boston area, and although you can't actually see the harbour, you can see structures that lie right next to it. It's a really neat view.

And the river's really neat...and none of the places we've looked at, except for the one we really couldn't afford, are anywhere near the Charles. Which means when we move, I'll have to find new running places also. *sigh* Oh well.