Colma
As a child I had the normal pleasure of being driven by my parents, between sister and brother, to my Grandmother's home for a visit on a semi-irregular basis. Beside the fact: it was always hard to pin down as a five or six year old whether this was a place we visited only for holidays or whether there was some other pattern to the trips, it was always a curious point that seemed like a mystery. The infrequency seemed to lend itself to the thought that these were in fact important visits, but to a kid a grandma is sometimes the same as a stranger --- one you are taken to visit for some reason or another on holidays and for other special but nondescript times. I'd look out the window a lot, when I had a window seat in the car, and watch the hills grow then roll onto one another before blurring by into a city. California's 280 Highway has a sign that calls itself the world's most beautiful freeway --- that always made me laugh as a kid. I can hear my dad relating this fact to us as we whined, hating all trips in the car that lasted more than 15 minutes and did not end up at some shopping center or another. 280 had it's landmarks though: Father Junipero Serra pointing at something with an incriminating finger, the Bubble House, and, eventually, the huge cemetery that sprawls out from the eastern side of the car with nothing but row upon row of white grave markers which, when you pass at certain speeds, end up making a dazzling display of geometry for the eye. Passing the graveyard, each time, first in the light of day then in the dark din of night, on the way to Grandmother's, the tiny tic-tacs of stone all plotted down on huge lawns. Not as spooky as the graveyards of most childhoods, with their creepy carved angels crying over dead bodies, strange animals guarding the departed, spiderwebs and misty fog lurking behind a creaky gate... this one was cheerier, or at least seemed so to me at the time. The neatness of it all, the math of it all, the way in which the combination of angle and velocity made the entire field of markers into a whole different shape and pattern of perspective; it all added up to an un-deathly feeling for death and a separation started in my head then between those of us breathing and those that cant, there were so many of them there right beside the car as we motored through. They weren't so scary.
Colma, California is the name of the town that holds the Golden Gate Memorial Cemetery which we passed on those car-rides up to San Francisco. The town itself is only 6 or 7 miles south of the City's limits. It has an interesting history, primarily as the United States' only "Necropolis" --- that is a place where ancient Greeks would place their dead, entire cities of them. Colma itself is a modern day version of just that: the city has more cemeteries per square foot than any other in the country and even more amazing --- the dead outnumber the living by almost one thousand to one. Why? According to the usual reference materials available while at work: the powerful neighbor to the north (San Francisco, proper) passed an ordinance outlawing anymore land for cemeteries, on account of rising property values. The dead don't/can't pay mortgages, I suppose. This is a pretty common occurrence though, in New York (Manhattan, more specifically) there is only 1 cemetery, beside Trinity, while just across some water lie a half dozen or so. I had the pleasure of staying a block from there, the grave markers were definitely of the spooky, old, decrepit sort --- quite the contrast. Poor Mary Pell, even in death she's being strangled by a garden hose. Back to Colma: yes, it is quite quiet. The resident's even have a funny saying: "it is a great day to be alive in Colma!" This kind of humor, light tinged with the laughter of darkness, is befitting. My own personal relationship to the town is now deepened further, moreso than as a child, having now committed a dearly loved one to the earth. A literal Ghost Town in my own small world of self.
It seems strange now, and it seemed strange to me as a kid, that you could live your whole life in a city only to have to be buried offsite, like old office files. The only people I know in Colma are dead, and it just seems very strange that in order to visit one I must take a train out of town whereas they all used to be a few inches or blocks away while they were happily living.
