This is not a Genealogy Story

    Nigel has begun to ask genealogical questions, starting with, "You say the girl in the painting is buried in Oakland. Let's go see the grave." The girl is a curly haired boy in the early 1800s, age 8 maybe, curly hair, Francesco Cerini. We go. I walk straight to the pillar in Oakland's old Catholic cemetery. We stop off at the office for a xerox of the names of the other 8 or 9 folks there interred.

     Oakland has 3 cemeteries close together at the end of Piedmont Ave. Catholic, Jewish, and one for Normal People [I intend this with irony: default/ protestant, not marked religious sets.] 

     The latter is mmmmassive and wondrous. 

     I've been to the grave of my Oaktown anchor before. He is Robert Holmes of the Holmes Book Store, which closed in 1995. He died in 1931, and was born in Lincolnshire. I knew the orientation and location of the grave, but there is just no way to find an ordinary gravestone at Mountain View Cemetery on your own, so I used Find A Grave online and then Google maps in a game of warmer/colder/red hot.

     When we located the stone, I saw it was angled backward about 25 degrees. Thinking it might be on a bent pin between gravestone and base, I went to right it and it fell flat.

     Great. Vandalizing graves in broad daylight. No one was around, but still.

     Turns out an 8" thick slab o' stone is right heavy. Nigel used some creative lift-with-your-back geometry and gained purchase. I got in under the stone and was able to help him actually raise it.

    I'll tell you the ending now: we placed it upright on its pins, and even wiped it off, leaving it in much better shape than when we arrived.

     Thing is, between raising it and placing it, there was quite a lot of hunching and grunting and positioning. There we were, 2 grown men humping a gravestone right there in front of gOD and ever'body.

     And laughing.