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Mt. Hope Cemetery
Sunday, July 2 2023
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
It took Gretchen and me awhile to get up and out of our room this morning. Eventually it was a message sent from Mariann asking if we wanted to walk with her to a vegan coffee shop she likes about 4000 feet away called Anyone's Café. That sounded fun, so up we sprang. On the walk there along South Avenue, we encountered a tray of about a dozen seedling cherry tomato plants someone had tossed onto the ground amid some trash. We instinctively put the plants back in their tray, and then I planted the leftover ones in some mulched soil I found nearby. We also threw away the trash, leaving the tray of tomatoes on the sidewalk like a desirable object, hoping someone would come along and want to rescue them.
Anyone's Café is a humble place with no evident air conditioning and tables that don't get wiped down as often as one might hope. I ordered an oat milk cappuccino, which is what Mariann changed her order to after initially ordering something with very little or not milk (because what we were doing was participating in her routine of going for a morning walk while still fasting, which doesn't really count if there is a lot of oat milk in your coffee). Gretchen had no interest in fasting and ordered herself a breakfast sandwich, which she conspired with the mustache-having cashier to rename for my benefit. (Even when vegan, I find the mention of the word "egg" in a food context to be revolting.)
On the walk back to Mariann's place, a strange incident happened on South Avenue. There was a white guy in a pickup truck shouting the names of various animal parts at black guy on a bicycle. This included rib-eyes and T-bone steaks. Evidently the white guy was selling meat suitable for a barbecue out of the back of his pickup like someone selling stereos out of a van. Someone in another vehicle somehow indicated to the meat merchant that he was interested, and they both made U-turns and pulled over in front of us, three vegans just trying to walk down the street. As Gretchen noted, it was as if this was some sort of setup for an episode of Candid Camera. The meat merchant saw us and gave an enthusiastic hello, but Gretchen must've given him a whithering look because the expression on his face then melted as if it had been hit by a laser beam.
Closer to Mariann's house, she showed us her neighborhood bar, a humble-looking place on a corner called Dickie's Tavern. She said that, to her surprise, it has lots of vegan options. Gretchen said the corner bar reminded her of an urban pattern she was familiar with when she lived in Milwaukee. It's a midwestern thing, which makes sense given that Rochester is on a Great Lake, and the Great Lakes are the substrate for a common Upper-Midwest culture involving shipping, breweries, and, as Mariann was quick to add, people not dressing up when they go out. Mariann also drew our attention to the density of the neighborhood. It's a neighborhood of single-family houses, but they're all on small lots, which makes it possible to walk to nearby businesses such as corner bars and grocery stores.
Closer still to Mariann's house, we encountered a strange little guy who was out walking his friend's dog, a pit-mix with a beautiful white-patches-with-brindle coat. For some reason the guy was wearing a tie. He struck up a conversation about veganism because of course Gretchen was wearing one of her vegan messaging tee shirts.
Later, Moore and Jasmin picked us up in the EV6 and drove us to a vegan butcher called Grass Fed. Gretchen had told me it was a kosher vegan deli, so I was thinking maybe there would be bagels with vegan lox or something, but it really was just a vegan butcher. The front display only contained various forms of vegan meat. They did make reubens and other sandwiches, but I can't say the reuben I ordered was especially good. (Gretchen was also disappointed with her sandwich, furthering a pattern of misses on good food in Rochester.) The conversation during this lunch was another of the kind that makes my eyes glaze over, mostly focusing on the logistics of creating and marketing a podcast. Gretchen could tell it was boring me and she eventually announced that I was miserable and that we should move on to the next thing.
That next thing was us going to the Mt. Hope Cemetery, part of which is visible from Moore & Jasmin's house. Our first stop there was the headstone of Susan B. Anthony. It's a modest little stone, next to another of identical size and style for her sister Mary. But Susan's stone has a different texture. Moore said this was the result of years of people applying their "I voted" stickers to Susan's headstone. The effect on her headstone had become such a problem that now, every election day, cemetery authories place a transparent plastic box over the headstone to protect it from the etching effects of sticker adhesive. Not all that far from Susan B. Anthony's grave is an empty section of cemetery that Moore, Jasmin, and Mariann have reserved for their own burial, which will also include Jasmin's mother. They will, of course, be having a green burial, which is permitted at Mt. Hope. Moore said there are a number of things that make Mt. Hope unusual, especially the mix of religions and races of the buried. Next we visited the gravesite of Frederick Douglass. Along the way, we passed headstone memorializing the death of someone named "Roe" and a gentleman named Philander Davis who had been married to two different women.
Moore and Jasmin dropped us off near a small indoor botanical garden called the Lamberton Conservatory, and, after paying the admission price ($2 each), we walked through. It was similar to the National Botanic Garden, complete with a tropical rainforest room and a desert room. But it was much smaller and also included a few animals. There were lots of some sort of turtle that we ecountered initially, sometimes having stacked themselves on top of each other so as to support a tiny little world. There were so many of them in one room that it smelled like a pen full of baby chicks.
In another room there were a number of tiny quail, each about the size (and shape) of a small coconut. One was standing in the middle of the path with his or her eyes closed, as if sleeping and unconcerned about being stepped on. Nearby, a couple people sitting on a bench were reading aloud to each other, though it wasn't clear why.
In the desert room, there were all the usual cacti and yuccas, as well as some species of tortoise, some of which had escaped from a pen and were wandering in the space through which we walked.
Outside the conservatory, we walked through a bit of Highland Park, one of the many designed by Frederic Law Olmsted. Mt. Hope and Highland Park are situated on the low, steep hills of a terminal glacial moraine, all of which is routinely mowed, no matter how steep the slopes.
While I took a long leisurely nap at Mariann's house, Gretchen went off to check out George Eastman's mansion and the Eastman photography museum. She wouldn't much appreciate the former, which she described as the residence of an eccentric who liked to shoot animals, and not necessarily with a camera (there was an elephant head mounted on one of the walls). But she'd found the exhibits in the photography museum compelling, especially one about a small town in rural Georgia that had separate proms for white and black students as late as 2008.
This evening the five of us went out to a non-vegan restaurant with good vegan options called the Owl House. The Owl House also has fun cocktails, which Jasmin, Mariann, and I all ordered. The only thing on the menu that seemed to fit my food interests was the bahn mi sandwich (made with tofu, though it could've been with chicken), which I ordered with a generous side of delicious rosemary-flavored french fries. Dinner conversation was mostly Grethen talking about what she'd seen in the Eastman Museum's photography exhibit, though there was also a long of the conversation where Jasmin queried Gretchen about how much activism she is up to these days. Gretchen had to admit that it wasn't much, though she was still giving lots of money to animal rights charities and still teaching English classes in prison, at least when the semesters are happening.
Susan B. Anthony's tomb stone and that of her sister Mary. Notice the sticker-affected surface of the former.
Click to enlarge.
Roe in the cemetery.
Gretchen and Moore in front of the grave of Frederick Douglass. Note that Moore is wearing yet another jumpsuit.
Click to enlarge.
A sleepy quail in the Lamberton Conservatory.
Click to enlarge.
One of the many turtles in the conservatory.
Click to enlarge.
Look at the feet of that turtle!
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Some sort of hibiscus outside the Lamberton Conservatory.
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