ancestors, clans, and holy ground truces

[cris]

The graveyard is one of those old middle class European graveyards where every family has a crypt, and the crypts form a small city of white marble and somber angels. My mom points out the tombs that belong to branches of family that I'm half familiar with, and how you can almost trace the geneaology of the city by the middle and last names etched

Comments

[rojagato]

But I still can't help but wonder at the social fabric that wove itself around my parents and grandparents, and what sort of [...] person I would've become if I let that drape itself around me as well.

It seems to me that it could drape around you, even at this point, if you wanted it to. Is that a correct assumption?

Re:

[cris]

I don't know. There's that other side of the equation that tends to stay unsettled with me. As I said in one of my postcards, it's for a person that I used to be, and not necessarily the person that I am.

There are also things about the way that my family lives vis-a-vis the rest of the population that still bother me -- and living there almost demands this level of complicity that I haven't quite squared with myself.

Re:

[cris]

dude, the grapevines in our scene have nothing compared to the chismis that my cousins have had to go through. Consider how we find it kind of novel how, because of the Internet and cheap airfare, we can go across the country and find people we know, or people who know our friends in Boston. Middle-class Filipinos have been able to do that sort of thing for decades, and their scope spans the entire world, and it's all based on the power of gossip.