Sunday, April 19, 2009

Sunday Memories - Where We All Now Live


What is it about stuff, a friend writes. The haunting of stuff discarded from her mother's house or the boxes of stuff imbued with her soul , what she calls evidence of who she has been, what she has done, now tucked away in her attic.

"I think, if they were gone, I would still be me, wouldn't I?"

I have briefly stop sifting through the remnants of Florence's and her mother Sophie's life because it's like finding the only proof that a once great pyramid stood are three teeny tiny pieces of rubble.

Or this crossroad of our family... not yet metamorphosed into Chinatown by fleeing immigrants... my grandmother, my other grandmother, both my grandfathers, my aunts, my uncles, my father, my mother, my sister, myself walked, often at night, stores closed, conversations murmured, sometimes pork buns eaten from Hoy Hung on Mott Street, that sign is just a teeny tiny piece and if I didn't see it would all that had happened still be remembered?