At Least It Took

Don't lure me to a cemetery with wine and then try to get me to say god. Not happening.

This afternoon was the official unveiling and dedication of the new Daniel Norton grave monument at Shockoe Hill Cemetery. Those not up on their Virginia wine might not recognize the name of the man who discovered Virginia's native grape, but let me assure you, he's a pretty big deal.

As today's speaker acknowledged, other than Chief Justice John Marshall, Dr. Norton is the most important person buried in that cemetery and that's saying something.

None of that was news to me since years ago I'd read Todd Kliman's "The Wild Vine" and learned the story of the doctor-turned-viticulturist and his life-long devotion to the grape that has since carried his name: the Norton.

For that matter, for years now I've made a regular pilgrimage to Shockoe Hill Cemetery for the sole purpose of maintaining the five stones I placed on Norton's original grave marker.

I'd even trekked to Chrysalis Vineyard because it has more acres planted with Norton than any place in the world and an array of wines made with the Norton grape. I know a lot of people find the grape's taste too foxy, but I like what our speaker described as "an American kind of wildness taste" that Norton has.

That's just a long-winded way of saying that I was happy to walk over to the cemetery to witness any and all festivities dedicated to Dr. N.

Walking toward the gravestone, I noticed two things simultaneously: two rifles casually propped against a nearby tree and a swooping trail of large white mushrooms, no doubt the result of those rainy days last week.

Things got started when a four-piece color guard from the General Society of the War of 1812 marched out from behind a tree in lockstep, all carrying flags. That's when they wanted us all to say the pledge of allegiance and while I'm willing to do that, I have never accepted Dwight Eisenhower's decision to insert the words "under god" into the pledge.

Which made me the sole person at the cemetery today with her hand over her heart who also went seamlessly from "one nation" directly to "indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Sorry, but I fail to see how a country founded on the principles of separation of church and state should require its citizens to acknowledge some crazy Christian's notion of a higher being. Nope.

Shockoe Hill had brought in the big gun to sing the praises of the Norton grape (and the 30-some varieties that grow in Virginia today): Jenni McCloud, owner of Chrysalis.

She talked about how all the Norton grapes in Virginia died out during Prohibition and how Horton Vineyards had been the first to plant it again. How Norton had been trained as a surgeon but followed his passion to become a farmer and viticulturist instead. She even humble bragged that her Norton Locksley Reserve had been rated #2 in the world by an important European wine magazine.

The marker, complete with a bas relief image of the good doctor, was unveiled to oohs and ahs. But the real treat was watching the color guard's rifle salute afterward, marred only when one of the two riflemen found his gun jamming and unable to fire.

To lighten the moment, the head of the color guard observed, "Can you imagine everyone coming at you in battle and you have trouble loading your gun?" Rhetorical question.

Naturally, "Taps" followed, taking me back to summer camp, except then it had been played on a bugle and not a cell phone. But don't get me started.

Tonight's fun was Laura Lee's one year anniversary party for friends and neighbors and held in their about-to-open back garden, which was in full blooming splendor tonight.

As far back as late May, I'd celebrated my birthday and that of a fellow Gemini in Laura Lee's garden, but none of the plantings were nearly as mature then, the strings of lights hadn't been added nor the comfortable furniture brought in. All the pieces were in place tonight to wow.

People had broken up into small groups, so simply moving between groups meant a change in conversations. A woman eating only a bite of spanikopita said that spanikopita was the only food she knew how to make. Another lamented her decision to wear high-heeled pumps. A man blanched at the mention of a $42 steak.

A favorite couple was there and they were just back from eating at Oriole in Chicago, although they'd run out of time to do the Frank Lloyd Wright house and studio. That led to a conversation about Richmond's restaurant scene back in the days when Millie's, Mama Zu and Helen's were as good as it got.

Those who didn't live here then found it tough to fathom that Helen's had ever been a big deal, but I know that it was the first place I was ever served gold leaf on top of a bisque, something that was most definitely not happening anywhere else in Richmond back then.

There was speculation about what's going into the former Kinfolk spot (and who signs a ten-year lease on a restaurant anyhow?), opinion swapping about the swank Brenner Pass, an in-depth analysis of the Roosevelt's burger versus Laura Lee's and a fair amount of trash talk about the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Wine and whiskey punch were laid out for guests to help themselves while appetizers of Mexican street corn, spanikopita, sausages and egg rolls were scooped up to keep pace with the booze.

Being surrounded by so many of Laura Lee's neighbors, I was bound to hear the restaurant's praises sung all night long. Everyone was so grateful that they now have this wonderful place to eat, drink and hang out right in their neighborhood.

I get it. People like to be able to walk to their neighborhood joint and stumble home when necessary.

And while it's not that for me - it's a tad too far to J-Ward - it has turned out to be a terrific place not only to meet up with friends but to meet new people. Repeatedly, in some cases.

You know what they say, as many times as it takes. The rest is easy.

This Old House

Oh, the meandering tangents I can take.

After spending last evening at John Marshall's house, it seemed only fitting to visit his grave site this morning.

Besides, it had been weeks since I'd tended the graves of my charges, Henrietta and Daniel. Walking down Fourth Street to the cemeteries, I had a funeral procession to my right and banks of honeysuckle to the left. Both somehow seemed fitting.

At the Hebrew cemetery, I checked on Henrietta's small, pink painted stone to make sure last week's storm hadn't dislodged it. It was still tucked into the curve of her headstone, as faithful as she apparently was.

I became devoted to Henrietta when I saw that her stone referred to her as "consort," which I mistakenly assumed meant "other woman," but have since been informed by the Shockoe Hill Cemetery folks can mean wife.

Over at Shockoe, I found five of the six pebbles I'd placed on Daniel Norton's grave site still there but one was missing and nowhere in sight. I went to my pebble source corner and found a worthy replacement for the man who discovered Virginia's indigenous grape.

Tending duties completed, I went off to follow my tangent: finding John Marshall's burial place. It took a while because I'm directionally challenged (even after looking at the map twice) but there are worse ways to spend a morning than traipsing around a graveyard, so I didn't mind.

I somehow missed the enormous tree with a plaque on the side of it saying "John Marshall section" but finally found what I was looking for, fenced in with a small iron railing.

No surprise, there was his adored wife Polly's tomb right next to his, so I unlatched the little gate and went inside to pay my respects only hours after walking though the rooms of their house.

It appeared that no one has adopted the lovebirds because there were no pebbles of remembrance on either tomb. I headed right back to my pebble stash and found a fine, big stone that seemed suitable for the man who dominated the Supreme Court for over three decades and laid it on his tomb.

But I couldn't very well ignore the love of his life who fancied beautiful things, so I found a purple pansy for Polly's tomb, appropriate, I thought, for the uptown girl who'd won the heart of the rough and tumble Fauquier County boy.

I seemed to be the only person at the Marshalls' house last night who was paying their respects this morning.

Walking back a different way than I came, the vacant lots were abloom with blue cornflowers, white Queen Anne's Lace and purple clover, a color scheme chosen by nature and one of my favorites.

At the edge of one of the lots, I spotted a small green plaque I'd never noticed before, despite having walked this way dozens of times.

"Bray's gambrel-roofed cottage 1790, owned by Edgar Allen Poe's foster father," it read. A post-Revolutionary War house practically in my neighborhood? How had I missed that?

And here's where yet another tangent comes in. 1790 was the year John Marshall built his house. Overnight, I'm all about 224 year old houses.

Being the nerd that I am, I came right home and did my research, finding not only a history of the house ("very attractively located at the entrance to Shockoe Cemetery," preservationist Mary Wingfield Scott wrote) but an old picture of the wooden house with the familiar cemetery brick walls and enormous trees looking much like the ones still there behind it.

I read that the wooden house sold for $30 and the bricks for $76 in 1875 and the author had no clue if it had been rebuilt somewhere else.

Now it's just a lot covered in wildflowers a mere mile from the still-elegant Marshall house.

Next time someone asks me why I live where I do, I'm just going to take them on my 1790 house tour and let them see for themselves.

Leaving My Mark

I decided the best way to escape the marathon madness was by visiting the dead.

A temperate and overcast Saturday seemed the ideal time to visit Shockoe Hill cemetery, an easy mile and a half walk from my house.

I've been to Shockoe a couple of times, always on St. Patrick's day for their annual salute to all the Irish buried there, but I had a specific grave site in mind today.

Walking up Hospital Street, I came upon the Hebrew cemetery's gate wide open and since I'd never been through it, decided to change that.

Situated on a hill, it was a garden-style cemetery like Hollywood with big trees and picaresque vistas.

One of the first grave markers I read said, "In memory of Henrietta, consort of Cesar Guggenheimer of Rockbridge, Virginia."

Hmm, consort? Not wife? Is that like friend with benefits?

As I was considering the nature of Cesar and Henrietta's relationship, I heard a nearby train whistle and saw puffs of smoke just beyond the hill.

Up a path to the fence I went to watch a train chug by below as they have probably since Henrietta's time.

I saw a massive tree whose trunk had grown so wide it had grown around half of Elias Markens' grave marker, as if it were about to swallow it.

In the Jewish tradition, many of the grave markers had pebbles and even bits of brick on them to show that someone had visited the grave.

Names rarely seen anymore were everywhere, names like Fanny, Yetta, Hortense and Gussie for women and Heinrich, Adolph and Maier for men.

No doubt part of that was because of their birthplaces - Germany, Bavaria, Prussia.

One thing I was not expecting was a Hebrew Confederate burial site with 30 men in it and many pebbles on the marker.

Each post of the metal fence that surrounded their graves was topped by a metal Confederate cap.

Then I found another non-wife, "In memory of Jessica, consort of John Abrahams, so she might rest in peace."

That last line with the "might" made me think that perhaps theirs wasn't a legal relationship, either. Hmm, perhaps that kind of thing wasn't as unusual back then as we might have thought.

When I went to leave, I looked down and found a brightly-painted pebble, of all the unlikely things. sitting just beyond the gate.

I considered where it would do the most good and ended up putting it on Henrietta's grave since her marker hadn't mentioned everlasting peace so she probably needed it more than Jessica.

My work done there, it was on to Shockoe for the main event, the reason I'd come in the first place.

But first I saw all kinds of heartbreaking markers.

Like the one for a five-year old and her Dad. "Nicholas Caire, born in France 1809. Lost his life in 1850 in the vain attempt to save his daughter from a watery grave. Lenora, born 1845. She sleeps here with him."

I saw a forlorn looking purple balloon lying on the ground next to the grave of Confederate soldier Charles Bell Gibson who died April 23, 1865, two weeks after Lee surrendered.

So he made it through the bloodbath of the war but not much more. Damn.

"William Lowery, eldest son of S.A. Lowery, died May 29, 1880 from injuries received on R & F RR bridge, Richmond." He was thirteen.

Enough of having my heart wrenched reading markers like those.

The next half hour was devoted to finding the grave of Daniel Norton, the local doctor responsible for cultivating Virginia's indigenous grape, the Norton, and namesake of the street a few blocks from my house.

It wasn't easy, but eventually I located the stone slab laid on the ground and covered in wet leaves.

Sacred to the memory of
Daniel Norborne Norton, M.D.
Son of John Hatley Norton of England
and his wife Catherine Bush
of Wincester, Virginia
born in November 1794
Intermarried with Elizabeth Jaquelin Call
and afterwards with Lucy Marshall Fisher
Departed this life the
23rd day of January 1842

At the bottom was inscribed "Bowen, Richmond, Virginia," the source of the chiseled stone, I assumed.

I'd read Todd Klimans' book "The Wild Vine" about this man's unhappy life, I'd visited Chrysalis Vineyards with the largest plantings of Norton in the world, I go by Norton Street on a daily basis and I'd tried Norton every place I'd come across it offered. For years I'd been meaning to come here for this.

And now finally, I was at Dr. Norton's final resting place. Just one more thing.

I cleared off the soggy leaves and went looking for remembrances. After digging through leaves in a corner of the cemetery by the brick wall, I found pebbles embedded in the dirt.

Choosing six of the smoothest I could find, I took them back to Dr. Norton's marker and lined them up above the top line of wording.

You are remembered, old man.

Walking home, I considered my morning with the dead an especially satisfying way to have spent a couple of gray hours.

And for future reference, I'm perfectly okay with consort on my gravestone.

On Death and Drinking

You know how it is with the Irish; everything goes back to death.

I mean, honestly, how many of those drunken revelers in Shockoe Bottom even know that St. Patrick's Day is a commemoration of the death of St. Patrick?

But seeing as how I'm half O'Donnell and my great-grandparents were Irish who came to this country on a boat, I have a soft spot for the holiday.

Not in the "wear green and drink until you puke" way, but more as a way to acknowledge my heritage.

That led me to Shockoe Hill Cemetery on a day that could be considered gray and soggy or perfectly Irish.

Placed around the cemetery were small Irish flags denoting the Irish born, of which there were quite a few.

Today was the dedication of a gravestone for the victims of the Confederate States Laboratory disaster of March 1863 that killed 47 mostly young women and girls.

The factory was on Brown's Island and employed girls and women during the war's manpower shortage, not just because men were busy fighting but because their small hands were ideal for the work of making ammunition.

Fourteen of the victims were buried at Shockoe Hill Cemetery in unmarked graves, including four buried next to each other.

It was at the spot where the four were interred that the marker had been placed and today's dedication ceremony finally gave them a headstone.

A bouquet of pink roses and carnation was placed at the site.

The sad business over, the group then moved from under the canopy over to the keeper's house (mercifully heated) afterwards for some revelry.

Once I got inside, a man approached me and introduced himself.

He was the head of the Pickett chapter of the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, one of the groups involved in having the grave marker made and placed.

Nearby on the floor were some damaged headstones and he gestured to them, telling me apropos of nothing about how they get repaired.

Seems there's a pool cleaner ("You can get it at Lowe's or Home Depot," he informed me in case I had any dirty tombstones) that returns them to rights without damaging the stone.

"The you use marble chips and put 'em in the hole and place the grave marker on top. It'll never shift or fall over again because marble doesn't absorb water," he told me.

Well, this was educational.

By then the food was set up and everyone pounced.

There was beef stew and corned beef and cabbage, both evocative of the Irish and both well suited for this cold day.

Since I'd had corned beef yesterday at my Mom's party, today I went with a big bowl of steaming beef stew.

I took it back into the keeper's house and settled myself in a blue leather wingback chair to enjoy.

Singer Susan Greenbaum serenaded us while we ate, starting with "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

Now that I was inside, warm and chowing down, my half-Irish eyes were doing just that.

Susan apologized for not having on green, although she gestured toward her green jacket, hanging nearby.

A woman behind me called out to her that green is only for Irish Catholics and that the Irish Protestants wore orange.

"Well, I'm Jewish and it's cold and rainy, so I wore long underwear so my Mom wouldn't get mad at me," Susan laughed.

"This is good weather for Ireland," another person said to laughter.

A man walked in the back and said, "I've been outside. Have you done "Danny Boy" yet?"

"I'm doing it right now but it's hard to get through it without crying," Susan said.

She did seem to tear up a bit and afterwards, acknowledged, "I don't care what your ethnicity or religion or lack of is, that's a moving song. It's mushy and the older you get, the mushier you get."

I wasn't going to disagree with her about that.

She continued on a more chipper note, doing some James Taylor, some Corrine Bailey Rae and some K.T. Tunstall for the group.

Afterwards, I wandered the cemetery for a bit, stopping at as many of the graves with Irish flags as I could before the dampness sent me back to my car.

Out of the blue, I had a memory from childhood of a plaque in my grandparents' house.

May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead.

Since I have no idea where my great-grandparents are buried, spending the day at the cemetery seemed like the most fitting way to acknowledge my roots on St. Patrick's Day.

I only hope they couldn't see that I wasn't wearing green.

The Not Your Birthday Lunch at 821

"I will pick you up for lunch at 1:00 but this is just a regular lunch, not your birthday lunch."

When I got in the car, I asked why he'd sent me that message.

Seems he hadn't had time to plan anything special.

Forget special, I told him, I just wanted to have lunch with you like we do almost every week and call it a birthday lunch.

No planning required.

To underscore that fact, I suggested 821, always a favorite of mine and now that I've made a convert of him for their black bean nachos, of his too.

Highlight #1: the server who for years has teased me about my inability to order anything but the black bean nachos admitting to me that she's now addicted to them, too.

What goes around comes around, sweetie.

Highlight #2: our server who when he noticed us admiring the James Callahan piece on the wall (my friend saying, "I just don't get the whole zombie thing") made sure to ask if we'd noticed "the shark and the boner in the tighty whities."

Actually, I had noticed the shark, thank you very much. Ahem.

And how better to end a birthday lunch than with a look forward?

We stopped by the National so I could get a ticket for a future show and then drove to nearby Shockoe Hill Cemetery for a reminder of the fact that I'm not getting any younger (or intending to be buried, but I digress).

Referring back to the first evening we ever spent together, my friend let loose an  inside joke.

"Another year older. Whoa."

Birthdays are for celebrating with smart-assed friends.

My WIld Irish Great-Grandmother

While I refuse to participate in the nonsense that is the American St. Patrick's Day celebration, I actually appreciate the more obscure events that happen at this time of year that are tied in to the holiday, like the beef stew luncheon I went to yesterday.

And today I was honoring my Irish heritage by sitting in the tiny Keeper's House at Shockoe Hill Cemetery listening to a talk by Dr. Nicolas Wolf about 19th and early 20th-century Irish immigrants.

My O'Donnell great-grandparents arrived in this country in the first decade of the 20th century, so I was curious.

I'd never been to this cemetery, nor did I realize how close it was to J-Ward; next time I'll walk.

I wondered briefly if the rain would postpone the event before it occurred to me that this was exceptionally Irish weather, gray and drizzly.

Dr. Wolf's first comment was to that effect, "How about this balmy warm weather? In Ireland, they'd be wearing shorts."

I was surprised to learn that of the half a million Irish who came to the colonies in the 18th century, fully three quarters of them were Protestant.

Between the high birth rates and the fact that most were tenant farmers, there was understandably a lot of pressure to leave.

Another million came in the 19th century, including even poorer and less skilled people.

By 1850, Tredegar Iron Works' menial work force was predominately Irish.

Wolf put it more bluntly.

"If it involved a shovel or heavy lifting, the Irish did it."

Apparently subsistence farming gives a person few marketable skills.

And the first St. Patrick's Day Parade in this country?

Georgia 1833; who knew?

By the time of the Civil War, the Irish were celebrating St. Pat's Day throughout this country, including the 2,100 Irish in Richmond.

But, as Wolf pointed out, not celebrating it quite like it is currently being done a la Shamrock the Block in the Slip.

"Did you see it down there yesterday?"

No, I didn't and for a good reason.

By the time my great grandparents arrived on our shores, there were far more Irish living outside Ireland than in it.

Accordingly, Wolf said that the history of Ireland can't be written without acknowledging the Irish living outside Ireland.

Which brings me to my great-grandparents.

My favorite story of my Irish great-grandmother came from my grandmother's early days as a new bride, living with her in laws.

Apparently Mrs. O'Donnell (as my great grandmother was known to all) listened religiously to her "stories" on the radio every afternoon.

One time, my grandmother was in a nearby room using the sewing machine when her finger got caught under the needle, piercing it through.

My grandmother was too afraid of disturbing Mrs. O'Donnell's soap operas to holler for help so she sat there with the needle embedded in her finger until my great-grandmother's stories ended.

Needle, bloody needle.

Such is the power of an Irish matriarch.