THE MURMURING MASSES

My apartment mate mentioned that everytime she heads to Colma/Daly City to visit her brother's grave, it's foggy, cold, a different part of the world. Which makes the cemetery sound like an alternate universe during hot weather, and I can thoroughly understand why there are Chinese restaurants nearby. Because nothing says "let's go eat" to Chinese people better than whole family together, especially when the temperature is conducive. I secretely suspect that for a mile all around the cemetery it's a secret Chinese American party zone.
I don't know, because I have never been. Regrettably, there are no buried Chinese Americans among my friends and acquaintences.

Well, actually, that's not quite true. I was at the funeral of a bar owner years ago, a man whom we all liked and respected, and another bar owner slipped and tumbled on the steep concrete stairs down to the storage area in his business, and there's a very good, even excellent chance, that subsequent to dying they buried him. Nice man.

Over the years I have been at probably less than half a dozen funerals and memorials. Way more than weddings, though. One wedding. Chinese. But unlike standard Anglo weddings, it wasn't an opportunity for spoiled brat behaviour, drama, and entitlement, from a bridezilla.

When my brilliant cousin's kid got married the first time, I was invited, but it was at Martha's Vineyard, and I live in San Francisco. So I sent a nice present and my regrets. The idea of a cross country flight, and several further transit stages, to surround myself with people many of whom I did not know having a grand old time for two or three hours in a place where good coffee, a place to smoke, and barring any decent conversation some quiet might all be impossible to arrange was daunting.

Besides, the chap in question is brilliant. That entire crowd is brilliant. I'm not.
I would probably have been a blot on the landscape.

Uncle Grumpy, by himself with his pipe out near the compost heap.

When I stepped out for smoke this morning it was foggy and Daly City-esque on Nob Hill. Thoroughly enjoyable. This would be a great place for a graveyard and several restaurants feeding off the crowds, but I am rather glad that it is not like that, for purely selfish reasons. Even though that does make a nice cup of Hong Kong Milk Tea or a glass of Vietnamese Coffee more of a hike.

I'm not really social enough for a cemetery.


According to a Los Angeles Times food critic recently, San Francisco is "apocalyptically empty". He missed the dense crowds of Los Angeles, the bustling urban masses of Beverly Hills, and the packed adulating fangirls in Hollywood, or something.
I don't know, it still feels a little full.



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