The Humphrey monument just outside the Mount Pleasant Mausoleum is instantly recognizable to anyone who travels past the Humphrey Funeral Home on Bayview just outside Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
The Humphrey monument is just a few steps away from the Weston monument previously featured in this space, and only about 2 km away from the funeral home.
The death of logos is an occasional series that looks at logos or wordmarks of organizations that appear on cemetery monuments.
This is one of my favourite monuments in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Like the last one that I highlighted, it depicts children at play. Or maybe at work in this case. I’m sure that I’m completely missing all kinds of symbolism here—why one leg of the ladder is cut off above the ground and why one of the climber’s boots is on the ground while he continues to ascend with a sock half off his foot, for starters—but I still appreciate the work that went into both the design and the execution. More views below the fold.
Read more »
The warmer weather of the last few weeks means that I’ve resumed my lunchtime explorations of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. One thing I’ve been noticing is that some people’s monuments are marked by the logos or wordmarks of the companies they ran, owned, or founded. The first example is W. Garfield Weston, son of eponymous company founder George Weston.
Although I haven’t been doing much walking there this winter, one of the pleasures of exploring Mount Pleasant Cemetery in any season is admiring some of the unique monuments and memorials scattered throughout the grounds. Many of the most touching bronze monuments are reflections of childhood fun, like this one of two children sharing a book.
If you’re wondering, the book is blank.
This red-tailed hawk seemed to be concentrating on something as I walked past this afternoon. A companion? Some potential prey? Another top predator, perhaps?
Read more »
The great thing about what is euphemistically called pre-need funeral planning is that you not only get to pick what goes on your headstone, but you get to admire it yourself. I can only assume that’s the explanation behind this seemingly pre-need headstone in Ashburn’s Burns Cemetery. The inscribed poem is so familiar that the second rhyming couplet almost slips past without notice:
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am the loud pipes of a Harley, Chevy or Ford,
Or an Elvis song played in three chords.
I like it.
This marker is in Bethel Cemetery in Pickering.
If you walk through any cemetery that’s been in operation for more than a hundred years, you’ll soon notice two things. The first is the sheer number of children that used to die before they were old enough to crawl and how many families had two, three, or more children that didn’t live to their tenth birthdays.
The second is an unusual obsession with precision exhibited on many markers. I can understand marking a dead child’s age as three weeks or 22 days, but many of the markers for older people also include precise counts of months and days. It always seems a little odd to see a grandmother’s age tallied up in the same manner as a toddler’s.
A lot of people shy away from cemeteries, but I always find them fascinating. Taking a stroll through an old cemetery is like walking through a highly-condensed social history of a region. As you progress from older graves to newer ones, the names change, occupations shift, family relationships become clear, and tributes to achievements both major and minor abound.
Awwww.
What are you, made of stone?
This rabbit lives in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. There was also a groundhog hiding under a bush about a metre out of this shot. It kind of makes you wonder what kind of sturdy underground home groundhogs and rabbits could find in a cemetery.
If you look closely at the advisory signs when you enter Mount Pleasant Cemetery, you may notice something peculiar: a reasonable speed limit of 30 km/h for cars and just 10 km/h for bicycles. Not only that, but while drivers are helpfully advised to lock their unattended cars, cyclists are warned—twice!—that their speed limit is “strictly enforced,” and that it is to “ensure the safety and respect of those visiting the cemetery.” Apparently, a bike at 15 km/h is more disturbing and dangerous than a car travelling twice that speed.
What makes this a silly restriction is not so much the different speed limits or the extra warnings for cyclists, but the ludicrously slow speed cyclists are supposed to maintain. I did try riding at 10km/h through the cemetery one day; it’s a very difficult speed to maintain. I was passed by several non-Roger-Bannister-like joggers who were bouncing along at, by rough estimate, about 12 km/h. My more typical leisurely pace through these paths is around 20 km/h.
As for being strictly enforced, none of the cemetery employees I encounter (including security) on my daily commutes ever do more than wave and smile as I fly recklessly past them at twice the limit. Either no one knows how slow 10 km/h really is or they think it’s as silly as I do.
Still, cyclists have it better than inline skaters; they’re not allowed in the cemetery at all.
Cemeteries, Wonderings | Val Dodge | 
September 11, 2009 | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe