I'm With The Band

Nan and I were playing backyard tourists 50 miles from my home, exploring the funky streets and alleyways of Chinatown and pretending I got a great deal haggling over a pair of binoculars that I later found cheaper on Amaon. While we were debating the medicinal value of dried ox testicles ($150/oz) , I was drawn out to the street by the tight rattling sound of Chinese drums (expected) and trombones (certainly not expected) in a weird cacophonic tune that sounded an awful lot like “Nearer My God to Thee”.

Slowly winding its way up Grant Avenue was a strange funeral procession-part Salvation Army, part New Orleans jazz band, leading a hearse and red mustang convertible displaying a huge picture of the recently passed on. Family and friends were walking behind throwing bits of paper, or Spirit money, into the crowd.

As the procession snaked through the throngs of people, everything stopped. I turned around and saw shop owners come out to the street, tourists stopped chatting on cell phones and window gawking, hats were removed and for a few minutes we all became mourners ourselves, respectfully acknowledging a stranger’s last mile.

When I got home I had to find out who or what this band was. This hodgepodge, almost pick up band, was a San Francisco staple for the dearly departed. Formed in 1911 and originally called the Cathay Chinese Boys Band, it played at almost every major event in the city; important funerals, Chinese New Years, the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge and the 1939 Worlds Fair. In the 1940s the San Francisco Musicians Union Local No.6, convinced the Chinatown mortuaries to hire union musicians to play for the funeral processions. As the mortuaries closed the local Chinese started taking their business over to Green Street Mortuary in Little Italy. The band became The Green Street Mortuary Band and continues to play hymns and dirges for more than 300 Chinatown funeral processions a year.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a great poem about them:

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

marches right down Green Street

and turns into Columbus Avenue

where all the café sitters at

the sidewalk café tables

sit talking and laughing

and looking right through it

as if it happened every day in

little old wooden North Beach San Francisco

but at the same time feeling thrilled

by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band

as if it were celebrating life and

never heard of death

And right behind it comes the open hearse

with the closed casket and the

big framed picture under glass propped up

showing the patriarch who

has just croaked

And now all seven members of

the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

with the faded gold braid on their

beat-up captains' hats

raise their bent axes and

start blowing all more or less

together and

out comes this Onward Christian Soldiers like

you heard it once upon a time only

much slower with a dead beat

And now you see all the relatives behind the

closed glass windows of the long black cars and

their faces are all shiny like they

been weeping with washcloths and

all super serious

like as if the bottom has just dropped out of

their private markets and

there's the widow all in weeds, and the sister with the

bent frame and the mad brother who never got through school

and Uncle Louie with the wig and there they all are assembled

together and facing each other maybe for the first time in a long

time but their masks and public faces are all in place as they face

outward behind the traveling corpse up ahead and oompah oompah

goes the band very slow with the trombones and the tuba

and the trumpets and the big bass drum and the corpse hears

nothing or everything and it's a glorious autumn day in old

North Beach if only he could have lived to see it Only we

wouldn't have had the band who half an hour later can be seen

straggling back silent along the sidewalks looking like hungover

brokendown Irish bartenders dying for a drink or a last hurrah....

If you’re dying to learn more about The Green Street Mortuary Band and other interesting death rituals, check out The Daily Undertaker at http://www.dailyundertaker.com/2008/11/green-street-mortuary-band.html

Ruins in My Own Back Yard

In 1896 San Francisco opened the world’s largest glass and steel framed indoor swimming pool. Tucked away in a low beach inlet underneath the cliffs, Sutro Baths boasted 6 huge saltwater pools and 1 freshwater pool. The 2 million gallons of water were recirculated by the tides daily. At high tide the waves would come in and fill the saltwater pools in one hour; at low tide the water could be pumped in five.  At 140 feet longer than a football field the baths were almost 500 feet long and 254 feet wide.  

I remember driving by the Sutro Baths as a kid and listening to my parents talk about swimming in the heated pools when they were kids. I used to imagine what it was like in its heyday with ladies and gents decked out in neck to ankle swim wear, bobbing around in waves of the circulating pools and of kids screaming and sliding down the seven 50 foot Toboggan slides. They managed to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire, and generation after generation of San Franciscans spent their weekends picnicking on the grounds and splashing in the heated tides.

When I first saw them they had long been part of Play Land at the Beach, a huge arcade that was well into its decline into seediness. The beautiful beach had become one of the places nobody with any sense would dare venture into.  Mysteriously, Play Land and Sutro Baths burned to the ground in 1966. I remember watching the fire on TV and wondering what the big deal was. I really didn’t understand the history that was disappearing.

The ruins of the Baths have survived, jutting up from the sand like giant graffiti covered Pompeii bunkers. It is a great place to view the ocean, bird watch and climb around the cliffs. The land is now part of the National Park Service, which also takes care of Fort Point, the Civil War era military fort at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, a quarter of a mile away.

Check out the two films http://sutrobaths.com/explorebaths.shtml

taken by Thomas Edison in August 1897.  I guarantee you’ll wish you were there.

中国画象 Chinese Portrait

I became intrigued by a blog about Chinese Portraits today.  It is an abstract artistic depiction of a person or personality by answering "If I were" questions. If I were a flower, if I were a word, a book, a motto, a work of art.  It sounds a little like a weak amalgam of Proust’s Questionnaire, Bernard Pivot channeled by James Lipton, and a dash of the Miss America IQ test. The concept is interesting, especially with its polarizing potential to be deeply insightful or painfully moronic (Miss Universe).

I think it would be fun if, instead of writing our own Chinese Portraits, we had them painted by the people who know us well; or even better, by those who think they know us but really don’t.  I think it would feel like sitting in the back row of your own funeral to hear what our friends really think about us.

This morning I got as far as writing two colors of my own portrait. I have no idea how many other colors it will take to paint a complete picture of me, but I’ve decided to keep a running list and add to it now and then.

If I were:

A  Sound:

I would be the long painful squeek of an old spring on a wooden screen door. It has always been my favorite and most satisfying sound; better than the sound of Cheetos or bubble wrap. It’s the in and out of every day. Hurried departures and tired and deliberate entrances. There is something organically satisfying in that squeeeek as the spring stretches and complains and then the loud bang of the door against the jamb, the short recoil and repeat.

A Flaw:

I would be Impatience. The hurry up and get on with it kind. The come on what’s you point? voice screaming in my head when I’m trying so hard to listen to what you have to say but I’m actually mentally editing out 50% of your verbiage because  you use more words than are really necessary to get to the god damn point!

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      

Between the crosses, row on row,
   

That mark our place; and in the sky
   

The larks, still bravely singing, fly


Scarce heard amid the guns below.



We are the Dead. Short days ago


We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         

In Flanders fields.



Take up our quarrel with the foe:


To you from failing hands we throw
   

The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   

If ye break faith with us who die


We shall not sleep, though poppies grow  

In Flanders fields.

2 May 1915

Major John McCrae

I’m thinking of my father today: This Remembrance Day, this Armistice Day, this Veterans Day. This day that was set aside in 1918 to memorialize the end of World War I. The Great War. The War To End All Wars. Now this is the day we remember those soldiers who are no longer with us from all the wars 

Every year on the Sunday before the 11^th of November my father and I would attend Remebrance Day services at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Veterans from US, British, Canadian and Australian regiments come to the cathedral and lay a wreath of peace at the alter.

At the end of the service the beautiful poem, In Flanders Fields is read and a shower of red poppies float down from the vaulted cathedral onto the people below. The poppies are a symbol of Remembrance Day because they represent the thousands of poppies that grew over the mass graves and torn up battlefield in Flanders in World War I.

Last year was the last service we attended together. At 91, he was one of the oldest veterans in attendance. This year I just couldn’t go without him.

Today, on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month I will be thinking of my father.

Looking UP

I went back home yesterday. Again.  As a kid I couldn't wait to get out of my small town. Away from everything small town about it. I didn't get that far away, either physically or emotionally. Now I find myself drawn back to my old friends and old neighborhood more and more. To the pot hole pocked concrete and asphalt streets that have shifted and shimmied with daily earthquakes and to the sky there that is bluer and clearer than anywhere I have ever been. We ride our old fogey bikes and talk about who lived where and how come everything looks smaller than it should.

My old house is long gone. Burned to the ground when the new family who moved into it ignored our warning and built a fire in the 100 year old earthquake damaged fireplace.  A fabulous old farm house with stables in the back. A two block walk to downtown. Now there is a hideous duplex on the lot; a jarring reminder that few people preserve anymore.

I walked to the corner and looked up at the street sign. Fifth and West. The sign was newish and green but it was in the same spot where I stood with my Dad over 50 years ago, looking up at the sky for a glimpse of Sputnik. He said we saw it but it looked nothing like Captain Satellite's space ship to me, so I just took his word for it. Every lunar or solar eclipse we'd stand on the corner under the sign that said Fifth and West and look up into that clear sky.

I spent a lot of time looking up yesterday. Looking up at that beautiful blue sky peeking through the leaves of the same trees I saw as a child. I was looking through older eyes but the view was exactly as I remembered it and I pretended that no time had passed.

Kirby Vacuum 1959

 Yesterday the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman came to the door. I stood behind my locked security gate, out of his line of vision and politely told him that I wasn't interested in him dumping a bag of dust on my carpet and then vacuuming it up with the new and improved vacuuming wonder for 2010. Hell, I have enough dust and dog hair of my own to contend with, and I am a suspicious of anybody rattling my caged abode without an invitation. He must not have done well on his pushy salesman course, because he backed away, sheepishly, and said, "Nice dog." Oh, yes, even though he couldn't see me through the security grate, he could certainly hear Hamish's rumbling warning of "don't get too close, Dufus".

But his visit reminded me of the guy who came to our door in 1959, complete with his own bag of dirt, and Wow'd my mother and the 5 year old me, with the wonders of the Kirby Vacuum. It was the first multifunctional appliance we had ever seen and guaranteed to pay for itself with every vacuuming. It had a slot in the back of the upright handle and all we had to do was deposit one thin dime into the slot each time we (let's face it, it was Mom) vacuumed. Mom was a fastidious housekeeper and figured that it would be paid off in a year. I can still hear the dimes rattling in the aluminum tube.

When it wasn't vacuum cleaner, or a bank, it was the newest thing in hairdryers for the ladies of the house. Take the bag and handle off, open the oven door, place the Kirby on the door and attach the hose to the optional hair bonnet, turn on the oven to 475 degrees, turn on the vacuum and reverse it to "blow" and you could sit in front of the oven blasting the entire kitchen with infernal temperatures until your Do was Done. I recall the perplexed look on my father's face the first time he came home to find my mom sitting in a chair with the oven door open, tethered to the beast. We soon found out that the wheels weren't really designed to withstand the blast furnace as they melted into flat plastic blobs, making it impossible to wheel anymore.

Mom purchased the Lifetime Warranty, and while it had to be rebuilt several times, it kept on sucking away. That Kirby stayed in the family for over 30 years, ended up with my brother's wife for a few years and eventually became my first vacuum when I moved out on my own. Mom finally replaced it in the late 1970's with their newest super, power train/overdrive version that was a $1700 piece of crap. A friend described using it to "dancing with Darth Vader".  

Mom had 2 vacuums in her lifetime. I've been through at least 6 in the past 20 years and not one of them could dry a decent curl.