The Daily News
1 What a difference a day makes.
2 I last left y’all with me on my way to a funeral that was about twelve scissors steps from San Bruno.
3 Oh, I’ll let you know. The town is Colma, a habitat for cemeteries, marble companies, tombstone companies, and a classic bar called Molloy’s. There are those who claim the place is haunted.
4 It isn’t the first time I’ve goofed on Molloy’s. It is right outside the entrance to the Italian Cemetery in Colma, where my Mom now rests. My grandparents are also there, and thousands more of Italian Americans.
5 AnywayZ, on Thursday night I sat at my computer thinking up lesson plans for Friday, because I knew I’d be absent on Friday because of a funeral I was to attend.
6 An awesome childhood friend of mine’s father-in-law passed away, and I was to go up on Friday for the mass, and for the funeral.
7 But at the end of all my prepping Thursday night, I turned on the news and saw film of the explosion that blew up an entire area of San Bruno. I was riveted.
8 San Bruno is an area quite close to where I was raised, maybe about two or three miles from my own childhood home.
9 But it was clearly where I grew up, and right in the heart of where Helene had been raised.
10 We both had glasses of wine and NO idea it had happened. We had watched the Giants’ game, the 1-0 loss to the Padres, and were ready to turn in when the news came across the wires.
11 We both stood astonished as we saw the horrors happening in her very neighborhood, and in a part of a vast area that I consider home.
12 My first thoughts were about anyone we had ever known being safe.
13 This uncorked a few unbidden glasses of wine late at night, and we both kept shaking our heads, praying for all of it.
14 Things like that happen elsewhere, not at home. And yet there were the images of blobs of flame bursting 200 feet into the night in the Crestmoor area of San Bruno.
15 I stayed up trying to make any sort of sense of any of it, and simply couldn’t.
16 Childhood memories flew at me like mad, rabid bats.
17 I knew that the next morning I had to drive right up to that area and share in the loss of a wonderful friend.
18 I wound up driving 101, because I didn’t even know I could handle seeing all of the ongoing tragedy. I bypassed my old stomping grounds, went to the services, and afterwards went to my friend John’s house in Daly City, about six or seven miles from “ground zero” in San Bruno.
19 At John’s house, a bunch of friends all gathered to show respect for John’s father-in-law, a wonderful fellow and at one point colleague of mine. His name was and still is John George, which is ironic considering that my name is also George.
20 This was on 9/10/10.
21 Notice any patterns?
22 After the funeral, we all gathered and enjoyed some excellent food and wine, and quite soon around six or seven of us had gathered in the kitchen.
23 We talked of John George, one of the finest human beings I have ever met. I had worked with him may times at Cal football games, selling concessions just west of the student section. We did this for years, and made a fortune each game.
24 John was relatively elderly, going from his late sixties to his early eighties. But he LOVED working Cal games, and I always enjoyed his stories about his life in Greece, and his subsequent life living in San Francisco, where he knew virtually everyone.
25 He volunteered for the church, worked thousands of volunteer hours at the San Francisco VA, and simply charmed everyone with his stories.
26 Good man, good man.
27 And so it goes.
28 Anyway, at one point, we had these six people all standing around the kitchen sipping wine and enjoying wonderful Greek food, when the subject of our grammar school, ironically Meadows school, came up. It turned out that all six of us had attended Meadows, but all were different ages.
29 A GREAT many DN readers attended Meadows school in San Jose. I always used to goof that I too went to a grammar school called Meadows.
30 My best friend from childhood Brian was there, so Brian, John and I held court about Meadows, and all the memories we had from childhood.
31 Amazingly, the kitchen also had people of various ages, ALL of whom had gone to our grammar school! Turns out many of us had the same teachers, and a LOT of the same traditions had been passed down from us to them!
32 So we all shared stories of warm summer days spent sliding down the hill right behind the school, cruising freely flat pieces of cardboard.
33 We all dug forts, which actually got one of the younger guys I was talking to sucked in one winter day. The fire department had to pull the guy out of one of the forts, because it had filled with a quicksand-type mud. The firemen also got stuck in the mud, so it was laughs. It is assumed that years earlier, I had probably dug the underground fort that he subsequently got stuck in!
34 I followed with a story of my own. At age 11, my friend Allen and I went up the selfsame hill behind Meadows and made our way out to a ledge. We knew that in classic war, having a spot above the city was the only way to win. The Greeks had the Acropolis; we had Meadows Mountain.
35 So we made our way out to a ledge above a 50 foot drop, and dug a lookout into the ledge. It overlooked the entire Bay Area.
36 Being kids, of course, we lost track of the time. It began to get dark, so I told Allen that we should dig a couple of small steps into the side of the mountain, and make our way back to the path that led down the hill and to safety.
37 Allen, being WAY more practical than I (I was a daredevil, of course!), and said he didn’t want to risk his life to do that. I tried reassuring him that it was easy, demonstrated for him, made it to the large, safe area that we used to slide down on cardboard, but he wasn’t buying.
38 So I crawled back to the ledge, and the two of us sat as the sun began setting behind us, somewhere between Half Moon Bay and Pacifica.
39 Around a half hour later, I saw a flashlight moving toward us. I heard my Dad yelling, “Buddy? Are you up there?” I knew my Mom had probably gotten worried and sent him out during cocktail hour. I didn’t care; I figured that I wasn’t going to find those steps I had so carefully dug, and that our only chance of getting down was probably in the hands of my Dad.
40 I yelled down, “Yeah Dad, we’re up here! It’s me and Allen!”
41 I looked down and watched the flashlight turn away and head in a beeline to our house, which was right across the street.
42 Allen and I then sat, with a few crickets making their statements somewhere around us, and the city twinkling below.
43 Within minutes, we heard sirens, and nearly every police car and fire truck in Millbrae raced up the Helen Drive below, causing a frenzy during cocktail hour in our neighborhood. Within seconds, people poured out of their houses.
44 There were lights, people, reporters, dogs, and all the rest. The firemen rushed in, appeared from a tree above us, and lowered a wooden swing to us. We climbed on it, and were rescued.
45 We got down, and were both immediately surrounded by reporters, by lights, by cops, by zaniness. We tried like heck to answer questions, but I just wanted to get out of there.
46 I finally got home, and my Dad told me that what we did was foolish, but that he was surely glad we were both safe. Mom was glad we were safe too.
47 I just wanted to go to bed.
48 The next day at school, our teacher, Miss Gill, asked if anyone had read any news that they could show and tell.
49 < Sidebar: My student right now ALSO came from a feeder school with a Miss Gill. They LOVE her. I loved our Miss Gill too. Anyway, it was a sort of sharing day, and Miss Gill asked the class if they had anything to share.>
50 Anyway, I slud down in my seat, hoping beyond hope that nobody would know what happened.
51 The room was silent, but soon, this one girl named Janice Schnetzler raised her hand.
52 “I have something to share,” she offered, throwing a sly glance my way. She pulled out an article from the newspaper that had the headline, “Two Boys Rescued From Steep Cliff” or something like that. I have the article to this day. That wasn’t the exact headline, but you get the drift.
53 I was amazingly embarrassed, but in many ways, I would never wish it hadn’t happened. My toughest part was trying to explain to people that I would have gotten down, but Allen was scared, and even started crying.
54 Yeah, I threw the poor guy under the bus. He never minded though, because he knew it was true. But I had to save face somehow. In later years, it makes sense that he was the more practical of the two of us.
55 Well, for one day, we were sort of celebrities. Naturally we enjoyed the attention, but really? I was embarrassed at first, because nobody believed that we could have gotten down without the help of the entire town. I had been out on that ledge many times prior. I KNEW I could have gotten down. My words, of course, fell on deaf ears.
56 So at the celebration Friday night for John George, I shared that story with the guy years younger than I, who clearly had similar things happen to him. The entire night went like that, and we talked of our love of San Bruno, and being wet beneath the blue suburban skies, in summer, meanwhile back…
57 And all of us had gone to Meadows. And all of us would NEVER drink out of the middle spout on the water fountain. And we ALL knew of Cooties, of course. And of Fudge bars, orange juice bars, and the best, Klondike bars during recess.
58 And we ALL cruised around San Bruno in high school, doing the American Graffiti thing, cruising the hills of Crestmoor trying to flirt with girls, listening to crickets on rare warm summer nights, and even taking bets to crawl across highway 280 when it was first built.
59 So San Bruno is in my ears and in my eyes. So is Millbrae, its sister city.
60 I’ll share more, if you’re interested, but meanwhile, if you went to a school called Meadows in your childhood, just holla.
61 Because your childhood may have had a lot of the same stuff as did mine, as did those younger guys with whom we chatted, and as have so many others, in so many other towns. It’s your neighborhood, and where all the monstrous and courteous occurrences of childhood rise wistfully in a puffy cloud of nostalgia.
62 And I guess I’ve gone a little long here, but I thought maybe a quick story like this could show us all that what happened on Thursday night in San Bruno could happen to any of us, anytime, anywhere.
63 The amazing thing is that we all stood in a kitchen putting a human face onto the San Bruno fires. We all used to cruise around that entire area. We all went to Capuchino High School, which was closed that very day due to the devastation of the fire. It was our childhood. It was all of our childhoods.
64 In many ways, six adults standing around in a kitchen in Daly City made sense the day after the San Bruno tragedy.
65 It was a sigh, a laugh, and very many moments wondering how those people made it through the frightening explosions, and watching their town, our town, burst into flames.
66 As I drove home that night, I took 280, as I have a million times before. I kept thinking about San Bruno, and how I would pass it soon. The memories of the laughs in the kitchen made me smile, and before I knew it, I had passed San Bruno without even noticing. I saw no flames, no fire engines or anything. It was simply dark. I looked at the Larkspur Avenue turnoff that led to home, and smiled.Already San Bruno is returning to normal. It was simply dark, with a few street lamps peering through the hills and trees.
67 Years ago a I managed to crawl across this freeway with friends, just so we could say we could do it. It was brand new, and nobody had any idea it was even around.
68 Stuff like that. Anyway, I need to get out of here. This was fun.
69 Live life.
70 Love life.
71 Peace.
~H~
| | Here are some places you might wish to visit in order to help the victims of the San Bruno Fire. Please help. More to come.     How to help Red Cross officials said that people who wish to donate time, money or supplies should visit redcrossbayarea.org or call (888) 443-5722 to donate money or get further information. Donations can also be made to the Salvation Army‘s “San Bruno Fire Recovery” fund. Donors may give via www.salvationarmyusa.org, (800) 725-2769. Clothing and furniture donations can be made at Salvation Army Family Thrift Stores. In San Francisco: 1500 Valencia (at Cesar Chavez) and 3921 Geary Blvd. (at Fourth); South San Francisco: 1170 S. Mission Road and 409 South Spruce Ave. (in parking lot); San Bruno: 300 El Camino Real; Daly City: 3 Serramonte Center (in Serramonte Center parking lot). California Volunteers will help connect people who want to donate their services to the appropriate organization at californiavolunteers.org. Silicon Valley Community Foundation has created a fund that will donate to nonprofit organizations that help the families in the impacted area. The San Bruno Fire Fund will match gifts of up to $100,000. Go to www.siliconvalleycf.org and click on “Donate Now.” This article appeared on page A – 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle |
The Daily News1 What a difference a day makes.
4 It isn’t the first time I’ve goofed on Molloy’s. It is right outside the entrance to the Italian Cemetery in Colma, where my Mom now rests. My grandparents are also there, and thousands more of Italian Americans.
