So, today, after breakfast, myself and a few friends drove to the graveyard thats next to Volunteer Park. I had never known this before about noon today, but both Bruce and Brandon Lee are buried there. It was suggested on a sunny but still chilly afternoon that we go check it out. How could you say no, having never been?
We drove through the park and theres nothing quite like a graveyard on a spring day. Green grass and fresh flowers provide contrast to the weight and granite signalling the locations of so many dead. We drive up through the plots to the top of Capital Hill and in the middle of irrelevant conversation the car stops.
Are we there?
Yeah.
We walk around the backs of twin stones, cinnamon and black, and confront the Lees. Freshly cut daffodils lie at the base and as we look down, someone notices the date of Brandons death March 31st, 1993 11 years ago today. None of us had any idea at all.
We stand and chat and jest irreverently and then we notice a guy walking up to where we stand, leaving two friends about 20 feet behind to wait. They are pretty clearly homeless kids, late teens and early twenties. The guy approaching us is Asian, backpack slung over thin shoulder, dirty like something left in the city street too long. His face is guarded, the sores on his face and hands seem like armor against contact with foreign bodies.
These guys here are my uncle and my cousin. he explains as he puts down the backpack and opens it. He pulls out a blanket and a pen and a plastic tube fall out as he does so. The plastic tube makes me think syringe for an instant as he roots and digs and brings out a metal rod wrapped with duct tape on one end. He indicates that his offering is a weapon for his kin. Maybe something to use against the demons of the underworld?
He was my mentor, this guy, indicating Lee the elder, at the sons this guy also, but not so much.
Someone asks him how old he is and he says twenty three and I note that Bruce Lee was dead three years before he was born. He mumbles something about the Lees being cousins five time removed by marriage, and the relationships grow more distance as the tales get shorter. He then takes the cross around his neck and places it at the base of Brandon Lees headstone. The encounter is punctuated by distinct uncomfortable silences, and eventually we mumble farewells and walk off to look at other stones. In search of a perfect mausoleum we wish to use as models for our own.
We drove through the park and theres nothing quite like a graveyard on a spring day. Green grass and fresh flowers provide contrast to the weight and granite signalling the locations of so many dead. We drive up through the plots to the top of Capital Hill and in the middle of irrelevant conversation the car stops.
Are we there?
Yeah.
We walk around the backs of twin stones, cinnamon and black, and confront the Lees. Freshly cut daffodils lie at the base and as we look down, someone notices the date of Brandons death March 31st, 1993 11 years ago today. None of us had any idea at all.
We stand and chat and jest irreverently and then we notice a guy walking up to where we stand, leaving two friends about 20 feet behind to wait. They are pretty clearly homeless kids, late teens and early twenties. The guy approaching us is Asian, backpack slung over thin shoulder, dirty like something left in the city street too long. His face is guarded, the sores on his face and hands seem like armor against contact with foreign bodies.
These guys here are my uncle and my cousin. he explains as he puts down the backpack and opens it. He pulls out a blanket and a pen and a plastic tube fall out as he does so. The plastic tube makes me think syringe for an instant as he roots and digs and brings out a metal rod wrapped with duct tape on one end. He indicates that his offering is a weapon for his kin. Maybe something to use against the demons of the underworld?
He was my mentor, this guy, indicating Lee the elder, at the sons this guy also, but not so much.
Someone asks him how old he is and he says twenty three and I note that Bruce Lee was dead three years before he was born. He mumbles something about the Lees being cousins five time removed by marriage, and the relationships grow more distance as the tales get shorter. He then takes the cross around his neck and places it at the base of Brandon Lees headstone. The encounter is punctuated by distinct uncomfortable silences, and eventually we mumble farewells and walk off to look at other stones. In search of a perfect mausoleum we wish to use as models for our own.
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Did you catch your cold from the dead?