Visited Forsyth Park and Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah

During last weekend's brief stay in Savannah, Georgia, Melissa and I pretty much confined ourselves to the historic area north of Gaston Street, with a couple of notable exceptions: Forsyth Park and Bonaventure Cemetery. Bordering Gaston and stretching southward like a green rectangular slab on the map, Forsyth Park is perhaps the best city park I've experienced with its numerous walking trails, open fields, courts, playgrounds replete with swing-sets and the like, bathroom facilities, a bandshell for performances, statues, fountains, and even a Marine Corps monument at its Gaston Street entrance.  It's what I had wished Central Park in New York or the Mall in Washington, D.C. to be...Forsyth isn't broken up like that but is continuous, no streets running through it.  If I lived in Savannah I imagine I'd be spending a lot of time there...the only thing I see lacking is a public swimming pool, but maybe I just missed it.  As for Bonaventure Cemetery, it is humungous, occupying a large area to the city's east and bordering the Wilmington River.  We went there because of the reference in John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil where the author is taken there by a local woman to a bench facing the gravestones of the renowned American poet and short story writer Conrad Aiken's parents.  As they sit sipping their martinis she explains the tragic story of their deaths.  He asks her where Conrad was buried...she answers that they were sitting on it: he had his own gravestone fashioned into a bench to invite visitors to sit there and watch the river.  The little plot reserved for the Aikens is very unpretentious...some of the surrounding gravestones and monuments are pretty grandiose by contrast.  By the way, I remember Conrad Aiken as the author of the short story Silent Snow, Secret Snow, which was made in 1966 into a short film narrated unabridged by Orson Welles and shown in its entirety, uninterrupted, as a Night Gallery episode...by far the high moment of that series.  That story made a deep impression on me...you should check it out when you have the chance, and the film adaptation was extraordinary.  The famed musician and composer Johnny Mercer, a longtime resident of Savannah and probably best known for his song Moon River, is also buried at Bonaventure...

The first four photos above are of Forsyth Park...in the third the Marine Corps monument is in the fore with the famous Armstrong House in the background on the other side of Gaston Street. And of course the last picture is in Bonaventure Cemetery...