F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald - St. Mary's Cemetery; Rockville, MD

The food Judy & Bobby Brock cooked this past weekend at their home outside DC was excellent as always, the bed they let me use was comfortable as always, their company was great as always, and on top of all that Judy drove me to Rockville, Maryland, so I could photograph the above.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said of Rockville, where his grandparents lived, "I belong here, where everything is civilized ... and polite. And I wouldn't mind if in a few years Zelda and I could snuggle up together under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought and not melancholy at all."

Some important person representing the Catholic church deemed Fitzgerald to be unworthy of consecrated ground; consequently he was buried in the secular Rockville Union Cemetery. In 1948 his widow died in a fire that destroyed the asylum she was in; she was buried with her husband.

In 1975, after a successful petition by their daughter Scottie, they were disinterred and, with their tombstone, moved to sacred ground at St. Mary's Cemetery, pictured below.

Zelda Sayre, a southern belle, came from a prominent Montgomery, Alabama, family. A cenotaph in the Sayre family plot in Montgomery's Oakwood Cemetery memorializes Scott and Zelda as well as their daughter. (I brought image below up on Internet, then photographed it.)

Trivia #1: Nathaniel West, author of The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, and his wife Eileen, were killed in a car crash while driving to Fitzgerald's funeral.

Trivia #2: Hank Williams, killed apparently by a heart attack at 29, is also buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery. It's amazing that at that age he'd already written so many great songs.