Stumbling on Brewster

BW

It is impossible for an observant person, a curious person, to move quickly through  Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Each visit is a new exploration, often dooming me to hours of shuffling through Web pages looking up this or that, my wondering spawned by stumbling on yet another intriguing headstone. A few of them are self-evident. I don't need to look this fellow up. I feel him in my bones with every skywash I do, feel that quivering hopefulness that I won't mess this one up as the paint runs over the paper. I was amazed to find his stone so very modest, just a ground-flush block in with the rest of his family.

But then, families being families, maybe having a watercolorist in the bunch wasn't that big a deal to them. 


Hodge brought Homer the mussel shells from Maine after her last trip. Someone else put the periwinkle and the fir cone there. She says the mower blows such offerings away but they always reappear. And I'm seeing his Prouts Neck surf exploding in my mind's eye, and knowing he likes those shells and the people who bring them.


So Hodge and I are walking along and she veers over to show me a favorite verse from the Song of Solomon on a large boulder and I gasp and realize that we're looking at the grave of a very well-known American ornithologist, William Brewster. 

 For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come (Song of Solomon 2:11, Holy Bible).

And this is why Hodge and I are such a good pair. We may light up at different significances, but we each light up in our own way, and when we're together those diverse noticings smoosh together and make Reese's peanut butter cups.

I didn't have to dig far to find Allen Emmett's brief but excellent profile in the N/D 2007 Harvard Magazine. I'm borrowing heavily from it here, thank you Mr. Emmett!!  There, I learned that Brewster's parents deemed him too frail and his eyesight too poor for him to attend Harvard (clearly, standards have changed!) He was an avid birdwatcher and record-keeper at age 10, collecting specimens with a shotgun, which was the only way one studied birds then, binoculars not having come into use. He used his excellent hearing to identify birds without having to see or shoot them, and Emmett quotes him describing the night sky "alive with birds...as may be learned by anyone having keen hearing who will take the trouble to stand for a few hours on some elevated spot and listen intently.”

Brewster birded Cambridge intently, doubtless ranging over the very spot where he'd one day be buried. His family lived on Brattle Street in Cambridge. From 1885 until his death in 1915, he was Curator of Birds at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, an honorary master's degree under his belt. Ha. So there. He was first President of the brand new Massachusetts Audubon Society, the very organization which had brought me to this fine state to give my talks.  He founded the still-thriving Nuttall Ornithological Club at age 22 and in 1883 co-founded the American Ornithologists' Union. I've done a mighty lot of drawings and paintings for them.

Here's a detail of my newest painting, a male Brewster's warbler (hybrid between a blue-winged and a golden-winged warbler).  

It was a full-circle moment, standing agog before that stone over Mr. Brewster. 

Thanks again, Hodge. Hand me a Reese's willya?