Sometimes you wouldn't know it, but cemeteries do exist, quite beautifully and elegantly, from November 1st through September 30th.
October, though, dominates the calendar when it comes to final resting places across the country, and while tours and special events unfurl with a vaguely macabre or Halloween-esque theme, a cemetery is a fine thing to know more about on its own terms, without the spooky holiday adding an eerie layer.
Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena is one such place of peace that is worth getting better acquainted with outside of October. It's an old plot of land, definitely old for our relatively newer region, with wayback histories told on the tombstones.
Douglas Keister is one of our country's foremost tombstonests, an understander and interpreter of funerary architecture and traditions. He'll lead an early evening walk around the historic plot on Tuesday, Nov. 18, with stops to talk about Mountain View's "unique hollow tombstone" and the final resting place of "Superman" George Reeves.
The walk around the atmospheric copse will be by candlelight, so prepare to have your cemetery knowledge deepened as flames flicker about in your general vicinity.
Cost? It's $80, and there's a lecture ahead of the tour itself (which you can attend, without the tour, for a lower admission fee).
We'd never suggest pulling October away from its cemetery-loving ways, but it is also nice to peacefully pause, among the cherub statues and script-laden headstones, to ponder the history of a place and how the marble and stone fill out its character.
