Here's your picture...
Gray over land ...
If you felt ambiguous today, so did the Pacific coast.
It should be nice this weekend here in Southern California. Hope that you'll have a good one.
On Memorial Day, I think about the American Armed Forces who perished on our behalf, but I also hybridize the holiday sometimes and combine it with the Chinese festival Qingming (observed in the spring) where you go to the graveyard and make sure your ancestors' tombstones are not overgrown with weeds.
That never happens at Forest Lawn where my mother and grandmother are interred (it's Qingming every day there ...), so you do a ritual pouring of water. Sometimes I cook chow fun and put plate there--they both liked that dish.
I should probably go to great-grandmother's tombstone. It's an old cemetery (Rosedale) and since my uncle died, I'll bet nobody's been there for a while. They're full there so it's probably not being landscaped (no new revenue--you can see why societies created holidays like Qingming and Memorial Day ...).
If it seems odd that this Chinese boy is not going to his male ancestors' graves (it does to me) as you would expect traditional filiality to demand, you can blame my Dad who never went nor kept track nor showed me the way. Today's actions are tomorrows traditions. To those who do not take children to funerals I say this: You must take the child to the graveyard to see the path to eternity.
I am my paternal great-grandfather's eternity, and I don't even know his name or what he did other than supposedly roll cigars in a factory in San Francisco. Such a pity. Maybe my grandson Julius' son, will dig in ancient digital archives and find these mental meanderings and my kooky stories. It's more than I ever got.
Anyway, we're in America now--we look back once in a while, but our gaze on this shore is fixed forward. So be it.
Have a wonderful weekend--memorialize something worthy.
Love,
Pops
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Be truthful and frank, but be polite. If you use excessive profanity, I'll assume you have some kind of character flaw like Dr. Wong. Tks!