Day of the Dead is an important holiday to me. I've lived in the Mission for more than ten years and we've always come to the neighborhood celebration (it's been held here for 29 years!) I love this part of our city's culture (influenced by Mexico, of course) that is so accepting of death; finds the sweetness in facing it. Picnics on gravestones. Parties for the dead. The death of the year, darkness and night.
At home we are starting to make our altar. I bought Rye a glow-in-the-dark skeleton shirt. Jonah has a skeleton mask.
I am missing my Grandma-ma, Mary Pat, this year. Thinking of her and telling stories about her a bit. She was a complicated person—not someone I admire—but someone I really loved. She used to call me her "Little Pretty". So silly when I am big, and not so pretty, but I loved it. A doting Grandmother is a gift to a girl. In the last years of her life I went to visit her several times on my own and I recorded and edited the story of her life. I'll put some up here this month, maybe, in honor of it all.
I always think of Belinda on Day of the Dead, beautiful one who died, whose lover is now mine. I try to remember her peering at me so directly, laughing and taking my picture.
And I think of my miscarriage; between Jonah and Rye. The little seal who swam away from us.
I also think about my own death, and how much I want to stay here on earth right now.
I wrote a poem about Dia de los Muertos in my neighborhood once, many years ago:
Day of the Dead
Now it gets dark at six o’clock. The streets are filling
with streams of people. The closer we get
to the procession, the more the crowd takes over
the streets, stranding the cars, till drivers give up
and abandon them to walk together, calling to friends,
taking fat orange marigolds off the sidewalk,
candles, borrowing fire, then walking with the Mothers
and their strollers. There are teenagers with white faces
of skulls, a man wears an owl mask, a woman
burns sage and waves it over us. Candle wax, burning.
We bob through the dark like a river of desire.
In the streetlights I can briefly see each person:
the brutal childhood, the woman who came back,
the blue dress, the late summer’s drive.
I want to feel my own dead ones walking close,
Belinda’s luminous face, Laura’s eyes of regret.
And I want to see all the crowd’s dead ones walking
next to them, touching their hair with prayerful
gestures, laughing when they laugh.
A man stinks of whiskey, stumbles, laughs,
crying and saying a woman’s name.
His friends hold him up and make him walk.
The dead are reaching and so are we...
At Garfield Park there are altars at the trees,
sugar skulls, stone patterns, flowers, photos,
shiny paper stars hung from the branches
with string. People crouch near plates of food,
leave small toys, pictures, cigarettes, rum.
High above us the moon swims like a
drowning face in the clouds, between them
the sky is ink-blue, few stars. Music drifts
over from Balmy Alley, people singing.
This in the center of the city. My neighborhood
is a holy place, sanctified street, candlelight,
human voices crying out.
[2001]
Here are some photos of the beginning of our home altar this year. it's just getting started—no flowers or food yet. That's Mary Pat in the little silver frame on the bicycle.
