The Cemetery Crawl

This blogging business is something that needs weekly attention.  My adventures are so varied from one week to the next. And I need to be studying my French lyrics for my Bastille Day gigs and Gay Pride is calling.  Ah alas, tis hard to be so diverse in one’s talents! And to live in a place that has so much going on all the time.  I s’pose every city has as much happening; it all depends on what your interests are.

So last week I went on a cemetery crawl. 

 On some other sunny weekend I had biked to the Colma Historical Museum, where I picked up my new bumper sticker “It’s great to be alive in Colma”  (1500 above ground – and I’m one of the few not employed by the cemeteries - 1.5 million below)  I also got clarification on all those bodies that were ‘disinterred’ from their San Francisco graves, then’reinterred’ in Colma.  The process began in 1900, when the city declared no more burials would take place in San Francisco. The property was too valuable! Colma was chosen because of transportation access, and the train stopped at all the cemetery sites.  In 1914 when the first eviction notices were sent, many bodies were dumped into mass graves because families could not afford the $10 to have the remains relocated. There was much controversy with the church because of disturbing of the souls. 

 The final leg of it happened in the late thirties when 90,000 bodies were taken from Laurel Hill and Calvary Cemeteries. These were Catholic cemeteries and all of the exhuming required the presence of a priest and a health inspector. Also bodies had to be reinterred the same day they were disinterred. Yeow. Too much information???

Although Wyatt Earp and his exotic dancer wife – a stunning Jewess, Josephine, whose breasts peeking through the opaque wrapper reminded me of Isadora Duncan – are buried right across the street in the Salem Memorial, (How perfect for my Daytonian friends, where Salem Avenue was home to Beth Israel Temple and Temple Israel, and I had plenty of friends there) I chose to crawl around “Pet’s Rest”.  Yes, finally we’re getting to the meat of things.

Pet’s Rest, as you can tell from the sign, began in 1947.  And people are so much more sentimental about their pets than their families!  The Tobins had a plot where five furry family friends were laid to rest. Near the back of the cemetery there was a mausoleum of sorts – Cinder blocks with pet ashes and a tile with the pet’s vitals on it.  

One animal was 5 months old.  And another was in reverence for  my Tehachapi dog Shanna.  Pictures of the creatures made their way on to tombstones. . . . I wondered if my sister would’ve had Meeghee interred in such a place???  Too late to answer that one.

This one is for Danahy!

Just about the right time frame of Shanna too!

Behind Pet’s Rest is another cemetery with a lot of the Eastern Orthodox crosses. As I make my daily walk down El Camino Real to Bart,  I see plenty of these.  The top cross was for Pontius Pilate and the INRI inscription,  middle cross was to support the weight of the body and the lower cross is a ‘foot support’ Did Jesus get one of these??  Part of the slant at the bottom has to do with if you were righteous you would ascend to Heaven and if not, you would drop into Hell. I am a little vague on this.  But I include a pix because it is new to me, although it dates from 6th century!