A most peculiar locution

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
                               -- Circa 1840, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When poets use it, it can be an effective device: "The smith, a mighty man is he ..."

In the hands of ordinary mortals, however, this grammatical construction sounds archaic and ... odd.

But nowadays I hear it popping up, often several times in the same story, from a couple of reporters on TV newscasts here in Richmond.

"Of course those budget talks, they cannot be ignored." (Jerrita Patterson, WTVR, May 24, 2012)

"The family, they are still out of their home this morning." (Deon Guillory, WWBT TV, June 6, 2012)

"The details, they are still coming in." (Jerrita Patterson, WTVR, May 31, 2012)

"Rescue crews, they're still looking for anyone who may be trapped inside." (Greg McQuade, June 24, 2012)

And those are just the examples I happened to hear while I had a pen and paper handy.

I've taken to calling it the puerile appositive. And the puerile appositive, it is everywhere. (Forgive me.)

The juxtaposition of a noun and a pronoun that mean the same thing, as in "The Richmond School Board, they want to hear your thoughts" (Jerrita Patterson, May 29, 2012) is a waste of words, childlike and foolish. What's the point? Just say what you mean: The Richmond School Board wants to hear your thoughts." What's the point of the pseudo-explanatory "they?"

(We'll leave for a later discussion the fact that the school board is an "it," not a "they." Let's just tackle one problem at a time.)

A friend who knows well how to use words suggests that what I call the puerile appositive is most often used by speakers of English as a second language or by very young children who are still working out how to construct full sentences. Another grammarian told me it is almost, but not quite, a "clitic left dislocation." (I'm not certain what that means in everyday words, so I simply nodded sagely.)

But whatever it is, it's annoying.

Unless you're Longfellow, circa 1840.

And there is no local TV reporter who is even remotely able to use the language as deftly as Longfellow did.

"Impossible!"

Even today it's easy to imagine a Yankee soldier staring up at roughly the same view you see above -- minus the highway and utility lines.

That Yankee would have been a part of McClellan's Union army moving up on Richmond from the east. The major obstacles in front of him were the Chickahominy River (which is not very wide) and the Chickahominy Swamp (a serious obstacle). In the distance was the rugged Chickahominy Bluff, defended by Lee's Confederate army.

"Impossible!" that Union soldier might have said to himself. And he would have been right. The defenses given to Richmond by nature's terrain enabled Lee to drive McClellan more than 20 miles back toward the coast.

The Civil War battles along Richmond's outermost defenses happened in 1862, 150 years ago this month.

It's almost impossible to live in Richmond today without learning more about the Civil War. We're in the midst of the war's five-year sesquicentennial, and we're living in what was the Capital of the Confederacy.

Katherine Calos is doing much of the educating. She's the lead reporter for the local daily's coverage of the 150th anniversary, and she's doing a bang-up job, especially in selecting the daily newspaper clippings from the Richmond paper of 150 years ago that now run in the Times-Dispatch every day. And it seems that each time you pick up the paper she's got another feature story about some aspect of the war.

Most recently, the focus has been on June of 1862 when McClellan made his run on Richmond. The city, which had been on edge for weeks, expected to be invaded any day. The noise of cannon could be heard from downtown Richmond like distant thunder. Lee sent boyish General J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry on what became Stuart's vitally important ride around the far side of McClellan's army to assess its exact position and strength. Stuart left on June 12 and returned on the 15th. His 100-mile route took him north from Richmond to Hanover Courthouse, southeast past Old Church, south to Charles City Courthouse, then northwest through New Market to Richmond.

I was on my way out to pick up a salad from the grocery store this afternoon when I realized I'd be driving straight toward what was Richmond's outer defense exactly 150 years ago. A short detour took me to the Chickahominy Bluff National Battlefield. It sits at the top of the hill you see above and it was from there and elsewhere that Lee's troops defended the city.

It's a small park today -- just a circular drive and a few information panels. On the other hand, the terrain doesn't seem to have changed much in 150 years. Like that Yankee soldier, I can't imagine how difficult it would have been to struggle through that swamp and up that bluff while under withering fire from above.

After a short stop at the park, and since it was a beautiful late-spring day, I drove a few miles further east towards Totopotomoy Creek in Hanover County. Turning left towards Studley, I felt like I had driven 150 years back in time into a green, vibrant, rural landscape, parts of which haven't changed much in the intervening years.

I found the creek, which stretches maybe 20 feet from bank to bank, and remembered the story of the death of one of Stuart's cavalrymen, William Latane -- the only one of Stuart's men to die during the mission. He was killed by Union soldiers in a skirmish at the creek. The story was immortalized for the South in an 1864 painting by William Washington that depicted Latane being buried at a nearby plantation by women, children and slaves. I have a reproduction of the original steel engraving of the painting on my dining room wall.

After  my sojourn through eastern Hanover, I headed back toward Richmond and my original destination.

As I said, you can't escape the Civil War in Richmond. In the grocery store parking lot sits a quarter-acre site surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Inside the fence is a preserved breastwork from the inner defenses of the city 150 years ago.

In Richmond, reminders of the war are everywhere.

Say it again, say it again. Louder, louder.

Pithy.

Straightforward.

Provocative.

All things considered, it's a great billboard with an important message.

I am usually embarrassed by Virginia's socially conservative stance against all rights for gay people.

Then, too infrequently perhaps, along comes an organization like MothersAndOthersVA.org, and the future looks brighter.

The billboard was put up a couple of weeks ago in a prominent position in Richmond's near West End and is scheduled to be there for another few weeks.

I wish there were more such messages on many more billboards.

Welcome Home

I haven't been to a parade in donkey's years, but this was one I couldn't miss.

Two friends and I were among a couple of thousand people to turn out yesterday morning for Richmond's first-ever thank-you parade for post-9/11 veterans.

What a glorious morning it was along the Boulevard in Richmond, from Kensington Avenue to the Carillon (itself a memorial to the dead of World War I) in Byrd Park. The weather was perfect. Flags waved everywhere. The marching units were crisply in step (except when parade-goers walked right up to them to shake their hands), and the marching-band music was really -- really! -- good.

When I got back from the Air Force in Europe right before Christmas in 1969, there wasn't much of a welcome back here in the States, and certainly there was no parade. Many Americans were beginning to be fed up with the war in Vietnam, and they were in no mood to celebrate veterans and their service. The welcome I got was from my family and friends, and, for me at the time, that was enough. I was just glad to be home.

But I must admit that yesterday, as we stood in the bright sunshine to enjoy the half-hour parade, wave to the veterans and shout out "thank you," I was proud of Richmond.

And grateful.

About 10 feet from me was a man of about my age, standing alone, wearing a cap that noted his service in Vietnam. He stood straight and tall as he nobly saluted every post-9/11 veteran who passed by.

And they returned his salute.

That's the memory, of a salute of pride and gratitude, that will stick in my mind for a very long time.

The bride and groom

I'm really sorry I missed my grandniece's wedding two weeks ago in Savannah. Judging from the images my niece and nephew sent me, Melissa was a beautiful bride. (No big surprise there!) And her new husband, Chris, looked pretty spiffy in his Coast Guard dress uniform. A military honor guard added to the festivity of the occasion.

So congratulations to you both, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Tamburello. Here's to a long and happy marriage. And here's to more great-great-nephews and -nieces.

As far as the pulled/strained/torn muscle in my upper back is concdrned, I'm still in physical therapy twice a week, but I'm not out of the woods yet, although the improvement is noticeable. Life will be so much easier when I can sit up straight and keyboard without paying the price in lingering pain.

But Melissa and Chris's happiness is clear, and my troubles are just temporary.

A joyous day

I'm breaking my long silence here -- more on that in a moment -- to offer my very best wishes to my grandniece Melissa and her new husband, Chris, who were married yesterday in Savannah.

The rest of the family is today on the way back from Savannah, so I don't have all of the details of the ceremony yet, but I can tell you that Melissa and Chris make a great couple. Melissa is a determined, intelligent and, perhaps most important, kind young lady. Chris is a fine young man who proudly wears his country's uniform.

I look forward eagerly to the day when I can congratulate them in person.

Just for the record, I would have been in Savannah this weekend but for a pulled/strained/torn muscle in my upper back -- the diagnosis isn't all that specific -- about 6 weeks ago. That makes sitting up in a straight-back chair more painful than I'd like it to be, but it seems to be getting better, whether because of three weeks of physical therapy (with more to come) or just because time is doing its thing.

Or maybe I'm just getting accustomed to the pain.

No, to be truthful, I seriously think it's getting better.

When the process of writing this blog becomes a bit more manageable, I'll be back. But in the meantime, I'll look forward to posting at least one of the real wedding pictures as soon as the family gets back to Richmond.

In the interim, my heartfelt best wishes again to the bridge and groom.

The hands of time

We'll all be moving our clocks ahead tonight as we spring forward into daylight saving time.

Which reminds me of the General Assembly.

As a reporter for WTVR TV, I covered the state legislature for a few years back in the early 1970s. Things were different then. Conservative Democrats controlled both houses at the Capitol, and there were so few Republicans that they could have caucused in a closet.

Relations between the factions at the General Assembly were slightly more civilized. Senators and delegates prided themselves on being gentlemen and in behaving in a gentlemanly manner. (In 1970, there were no female senators. If memory serves, there was one woman delegate, Mrs. Eleanor Sheppard, who represented Richmond.)

But more to the point, they got things done on time.

Almost always.

On several occasions that I recall, one house or the other just couldn't finish its business by midnight on the last day.

So someone would turn back the official clock in the House or the Senate by an hour or so in order to preserve the fiction that the rules were not being violated.

Think about that. A General Assembly session might be extended by as much as an hour or two.

Nowadays, we're lucky if the legislature doesn't extend its work by a month or two. Today was the day the current session was supposed to end, but there's no state budget for the next two fiscal years yet in sight.

So both houses have agreed to a special session in order to hammer out a spending plan. Lord knows how long it will take them.

It's no longer sufficient to turn back the hands of the official clock.

Now they have to rip whole days from the calendar, or weeks or -- heaven forbid -- months in order to preserve the fiction that the House and Senate are capable of meeting a deadline.