On the Mend

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.

–Ovid

Doing better this morning, after a good night's sleep, breakfast with P, and a scan of the morning papers online. It's 63 here, gloomy and drizzling at times. A perfect September day.

Yesterday I was still living in the aftermath of a rotten day, a rotten month, the fetid cherry on top of the curdled mass of a summer best forgotten. I posted, then took it down for fear of worrying P or one of the handful of friends who still read this sporadic blog.

Maybe I'm feeling a little less gloomy because I'm back to eating P's cooking, and to exercising a little. We walked for eighty solid minutes yesterday before supper, scouting out potential rental properties for my sister, whom we're trying to convince to move here. We tramped through sections of Corning we've never seen, some inviting and some less so. Always nice to see something new and burn a few calories in the process.

Earlier in the day I set out on a run down toward South Corning as my lunch break, training for the half-marathon I likely will now be forced to skip due to work demands back in Florida. It's always something down there, a swirl of conflict and human folly and misery that's been my milieu for a quarter century now. No wonder my vitals creep back towards normal once I've been away for a few days.

Yesterday's run brought me past Hope Cemetery (it turns out Amo and family are actually buried in the "Annex", purchased decades after the first internment at the actual Hope Cemetery in the 1860s), and a curiosity. There on the fringe of the graveyard stands a cannon flanked by piles of cannonballs.

I can't quite place the vintage, except to note that it's either early eighteenth century or a ceremonial model used at things like Fourth of July celebrations years later. The pedestal isn't original, and bears markings suggesting the later scenario.

Beside the artillery display is an enigmatic cross and flag, the former quite old, with "Cuba" emblazoned on top.

Maybe a memorial to the Spanish-American War?

But then it gets stranger.

The monument is flanked by a series of decaying white fence posts. Drawing closer, I note a surprising name inscribed on the first.

Why would Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, a guy who probably played a role in the need for some of the headstones up here for young men who died in 1862 and 1863, be remembered in this spot?

And why would the next post list the name of Stonewall Jackson?

At least those two are generally known. The fact that Jeb Stuart also gets his own post just adds to the mystery of this spot.

Rounding the other side of the memorial, we encounter our first Union officer. Whom do they choose to remember? Grant, the savior of the Republic? Sherman, the scourge of Georgia?

Nope. Instead, it's the buffoonish cavalry fop George Armstrong Custer.

An odd choice, this reckless man-child whose primary claim to fame was getting his men massacred at Little Big Horn years after the war.

The final name scribbled on one of these posts makes more sense, although his name has been largely lost to memory in our time.

You and I may not know the name, but the average kid in late nineteenth century America certainly did. Strong Vincent was a lawyer-turned-soldier who led the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was Vincent who noticed the yawning gap in the Union lines on day two of the battle, and hurried his troops onto Little Round Top before it could be seized by the Confederates, getting himself mortally wounded in the groin for his trouble. But for Vincent's courage and understanding of the peril, we'd all be speaking Alabamian right now.

There are some reminders of Vincent around his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, most prominently a statue of him exhorting his men by waving a riding crop his wife had given him, but mostly he's known only to Civil War buffs.

So, what of this strange little monument crumbling along the periphery of Corning's main cemetery? I figure it's probably an artifact of that weird reconciliation we went through as a country forty-or-so years after Appomattox, when old Rebel and Federal veterans shook hands and agreed they should set aside their differences and concentrate on keeping down blacks, women, and immigrants.

Damn, I've become cynical in my old age. But it's kind of true, isn't it?

Time to get cleaned up before Chris the painter gets here and sees me in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt. I'm mediating in a little over an hour, then get the daily treat of an evening with Peg walking the neighborhood, maybe watching a little TV over supper, then to bed for the sleep that's mostly evaded me all summer. And the Bills are playing tonight! We've developed an odd affection for western New York's version of the Bulldogs, Gators, Volunteers and Crimson Tide all rolled into one. With a kickoff after eight, we'll likely make it through a quarter or maybe two before Peg nods off.

It's just a better way to live up here. There's discernment in all this.