A Dead Reckoning
I stopped contributing to this blog once I realized Google had abandoned the platform, opening the door (not even a back one) to bad actors with malicious intent and forcing the few of us left to give up the ghost. I even took it offline until the other month when I had a change of heart.
I could move to Substack or whatever the cool kids are using these days. But why start from scratch when I can just pile on more posts to 20 years' worth of memories. Admittedly, I felt a little lost without my personal parcel on the internet.
I'm also a wee bit worried about becoming another casualty of artificial intelligence. Not just the job loss, which will happen. I'm talking about its threat to humanity. One of the ways it initially insinuates itself into our society is through de-skilling. A doctor that relies exclusively on an algorithm's clinical diagnosis risks no longer recognizing diseases or disorders (or AI hallucinations!) using their own hard-earned training. A teacher who decides to offload lesson plans to ChatGPT may find over time they lecture with less vigor and fail to engage future generations to think critically. And don't get me started on the bots influencing everyday decisions.
I don't want to lose my writing skills, weak as they may currently be. So today, on my second favorite holiday, I'm bringing this blog back from the dead.
Now, that's the spirit
It wasn't until I moved to San Diego decades ago that I became interested in Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. Such celebrations date back several millenia to ancient Aztecs and Nahua people who created annual rituals, later merged with Catholic traditions, to remind us that the dead remain an integral part of living.
These days, there are festival-like celebrations sprinkled throughout the county, but we always head to Old Town, the birthplace of what is now California, because they pull out all the stops and because it just feels a tad more authentic. There's ballet folklorica dancers, catrina dolls, a community offrenda and other memorials. Of course, there's also face painting, cervezas, food vendors, and souveniers, not to mention a candlight procession that always brings tears. Somehow in all the kitcsh, a visitor never loses sight of the reason for gathering.
My own mental offrenda is running out of shelf space. So many family and friends are gone now. Most left due to natural causes, but not all. You think someone important to you will always be in your thoughts, but time has a way of thinning out the void reminders.
The last two years, we've brought our grandsons, now 4 and 6, to Old Town's festival. They love decorating sugar skulls and correcting my enunciation of "papel picador." This year, they decorated wooden butterflies dedicated to their Aunt Julie, who passed over the summer at age 31. The circumstances behind her death still make my blood boil. It shouldn't have happened, but it did.
The Monarch butterflies' migration in Mexico coincides with the holiday, and as such, the butterfly has come to represent the souls of the deceased visiting their survivors. When done decorating their wooden butterflies, people hang them in a memorial garden. I asked my grandsons where they'd liked to hang their tributes. They both said they'd like to bring them home for the next time Julie visits.
Turns out my grandsons understood something about Día de los Muertos that took me decades to learn: the dead don't visit on our schedule. They're already here, just waiting for us to notice.
