I have  not been able to square away the time to do a proper narrative intepretation of the day, but meanwhile, I’ve uploaded a slideshow of over 75 images from this year’s SF Pride.

Not included here are the blurry camera phone images of Kellita, “Queen of Carnival SF 2008 and  Head Feather, Hot Pink Feathers Dance Co. & Showgirl Academy,” who did an impromptu performance for us Pride-weary BART subway train riders. That’s yet to come.

Love the t-shirts, even love the font on the t-shirts. 

Their son is adorable, and had the best deadpan stare at the camera, from beneath a very fabulous hat. But, since I err on the conservative side w/ kid images (other than me own), the little cutie will have to remain as cute as your imagination can conjure.  

[Update (small world dep't.): Papa reads LD! So we corresponded, and I've got the A-OK to put their son's adorable mug up here, so I swapped the photo. They write about their beautiful family at Endless Grins. G'wan over and say hi. Also g'wan over and see what their son's t-shirt said. Dave (Papa) wrote about the day they had (Daddy John, & cutie Caden), and the reception they all got for their t-shirts. Seems I was one among a crush of paparazzi.]

Am still scrambling for the nonexistent time to do up a whole pictorial narrative of Pride. Severely delimited childcare this month, compounded by Life.  Meanwhile I’ll trot these pics out daily ’til I can get the whole shebang up.

The lil’ monkey moons at her downstairs cousin, who is demonstrating some primo Pride pride.

Flip-side of his sign? “I was a witness when my Grandmas got married.”  Which he was. In 2004 and 2008.  He rollerbladed all the way up Market Street, complete with a rainbow flag superhero cape. Didn’t get the blades wedged in ONE streetcar track, nor ONE Muni airvent. Now that’s superheroic, and I’m very proud of him.

Consider this a wee little Pride pictorial teaser.  Today I’m solo w/ both kids, and Little Farm beckons. Later I’ll do another multi-photo, ramblingly-narrated dealie like for Baba’s Day. You’ve been warned.

En route to Pride, Berkeley, CA.

We walked as a family to our nearest BART subway station: the girlie, the boychild, the beloved, her brother, and his two kids.  Came back with our across-the-street lesbo family chums, about six hours,  several hot city miles, 5 ounces of sun screen, a half-dozen friends (both expected and unexpected), two ice cream sandwiches, and one temper tantrum later. Would we do it again next year? Ask me in 364 days.

There is no way to gently ease into a sentence like this so I will merely plunge in and say that early Wednesday morning last week, I heard the news that a dear, old friend had suddenly, unexpectedly, died.  No warning; no cause of death found; simply the fact of it.  Her heart — enormous, thrumming with vitality — simply stopped. Since then things have been quite out of balance.

There is much to the story of how she recently resurfaced in my life.  Mostly it’s the story of her relationship to an even dearer, just as old friend.  At some point I might be able to tell some of that, hopefully — as ever — as a means to gather and spread whatever  insights might be found quietly resting between the lines. Others may see what I can’t. And if some haven’t yet really, really seen how precious and conditional our days are, I would hope this story might bring that truth another heartbeat closer.

Meanwhile, I am amazed at what everyday events look like.  It’s as if I’m peering through the arse end of a pair of binoculars.  Rather than things far away appearing close-up, things close-up seem far away.  News of the day comes to me through this warbley lens, and so many of the hairs I’ve been obsessively splitting as of late can only be made out as a clump.  I can’t see the trees for the forest.

This is the fifth devastating death in the life of someone either close or downright dear or even utterly vital to me.  (I’m talking here: sudden death or tragic; happened in the prime of life, or even before the prime was reached.)  It is essentially impossible, as a consequence, not to look at my own life differently.  Which is what was behind my Star light, star bright  post last week.

I should say that while so many events, the broader national issues, the international crises are all wavering strangely in my vision — as if seen through heat waves radiating up off a hot hot summer pavement — some things are razor sharp.  I see clearly how beautiful my beloved is. How insignificant most every conflict is, between me and her.  We are now just over a week later, and still I haven’t once become caught on any of the old, meaningless snags, mesmerizing us with the ephemeral. I will do everything in my power to see to it that this continues to last. I see how bracingly graced I am, to continue to be here. What a blessing it is that I have this moment — any moment — with my children. I see the curl of my son’s hair after a bath, and the flicker of the late summer light on his pink fairy wings as he dances.

[For posterity, I should note that a coupla years back I made a Baba's Day proclamation, which holds true for this year and any other one to boot.]

Our day began with breakfast in bed, but I’m not including images of that here because Baba (a) doesn’t like her likeness splashed all over the internet that much, plus (b) Jiminy Crickets I need a haircut.  So we jump to the moment above, where a brilliant bright day beckons us to one of the world’s finest cities, espied from one of the word’s most scenic approach bridges. The work-a-day Bay Bridge doesn’t get the glam attention that the Golden Gate does (see it? off there to the right? through the windshield schmutz?), but it performs a vital service: it brings much of the city’s workers over and back, daily (the poor schmucks not hep to the subway under the bay), and it affords all us Bay Areans a breathtaking view of our City’s downtown, Russian Hill,  and wharfs from the east.

Mama and girlchild, here in one of her several crafty disguises (girlchild; not mama). We parked just downhill from the intersection Castro & Beaver, and yes, I have an old friend — a gay man — who lives in an apartment there.  We’ve always found it the pinnacle of irony that any gay man  would be living at the corner of Castro & Beaver.

The show we’re gonna see! Free to Be… You and Me!  Yippee skippee! At the Castro!  Free, thanks to the generosity of Frameline and Our Family Coalition!

The beloved grew up listening to Free to Be… You and Me, and we’ve played it nearly nonstop for our kids.  Fan freakin’ tastic.  What was screened was an exhibition print — made specially available to Frameline, San Francisco’s International LGBT film festival — of a 1974 television special crafted around the album.  (Here it is in all its splendor, broken into 17 parts on YouTube.) Proceeds from the album went to Ms. Magazine Foundation for Women; do check out the Wikipedia link about it, it’s an amazing thing and still apropos today — not one of the pieces is dated yet.  Alas.

Boychild’s first movie theater lobby. Takin’ to it like a duck to water. Not shown: Snow White, who was passing out apples from a basket. Yes, Snow White, properly bedecked, tip-to-tail. With a verycloseshave.

The lil’ monkey is ready for showtime.  This was her second trip to the movies.  Trip #1 was with Mama (Baba had to stay home w/ a sick boy) to the sing-along Sound of Music, also at the Castro Theater.  Thanks to the Castro’s frequently very kid-friendly programming, it’s entirely possible that our kids will spend the first five years of their movie-going lives ONLY seeing films here, easily the Bay Area’s most majestic movie palace.  The Grand Lake in Oakland is also of a similar ilk — also still has a working Wurlitzer.  I’m not sure how I’m going to explain an ordinary multiplex to them. (”Baba, where’s the ornate art-deco friezes?”)

Lil’ peanut chillaxin’ on the most comfortable seat in the house (according to his particular tastes). He’s sporting rainbow beads, courtesy Julia and Yensing from Our Family. COLAGE’s Director Beth Tepper worked the line outside passing out postcards listing upcoming kid-friendly Pride events. By the way, my son mobbed the popcorn. Both my kids eat popcorn like I do: ramming the entirety of a handful into the mouth all at once. Mama does each individual kernel, one after the other.  I can’t explain why I eat this way. No idea. But they’ve inherited it.  I judge them not.

Easily the most thunderous applause came after Rosey Grier’s “It’s Alright to Cry,” here shown mid-lap-dissolve.  It’s a fantastic song. I can’t begin to imagine what it must have meant for so many of the gay men, many now dads, in the audience that day. That plus “William Wants a Doll.”  Anthems, both.

Many of the animated or  puppeted enactments of the songs in Free to Be… You and Me were sweet but not particularly remarkable.  But towards the end of “It’s Alright to Cry,” we were treated to a montage of images of grown-ups, mostly men, weeping.  It was utterly arresting. 

In fact, here, here’s the whole thing, embedded:

“Feelings are such real things, and they change, and change, and change,” goes the song. Truer and more Buddhist words were never spoken.

Girlchild outside, engaging herself while we talk with friends in the lobby after the show. Note rainbow beads on her, too.  The fashion hit for the whole day.

I have so many memories of this lobby (’nother angle on it here), many of which began to be formed when I was not too much older than my daughter. My dad used to take my sister and me here all the time for “old timey movies” — Jeanette Macdonald & Nelson Eddy, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers, anything with Errol Flynn.  Pops would dress up nice, over my sister’s and my protestations (”You always wear a tie when you’re going to The City.”)  We’d snag parking in the little city lot behind the theater, or on the rare occasions when it was full, the other little city parking lot up 18th Street. Dad knew all sorts of insider info about the city.  He took Geography classes on urban field trips all over the Bay Area. And he, ahem, might have taken a field trip or two to the Castro himself.  At any rate, my sister and I felt special, and we all were transported, in our various ways, by the golden age of film up on the grand dame movie screen, introduced (as always) by show tunes on the mighty Wurlitzer organ.

Outside the theater, we espied none other than Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, legendary gay activist, confrere of Harvey and one-time stand-up comic, on a cell phone.  Hot cookie.

Okay, I followed him. No I didn’t introduce myself, or even ask to take his picture. Poor guy’s a public figure; he’s probably used to it. Plus I’m shy. Okay, I’m that strange combination of shy and yet mildly interested in recording various Notable Moments in Gay History.  Relevant intel: he’s a Giants fan (or at least his shirt was  a Giants jersey) and an iPhone user. Him and like 127,948 other SF residents.

Above, he’s entering Twin Peaks, the bar at the corner of Castro & 17th & Market (it’s a three-way, and  yes, I heard that snickering.).  I have to stop the Baba’s Day travelogue to note that Twin Peaks is a landmark for a good reason: it was the first gay bar in the country to have glass walls along its streetside (installed: 1972).  For the young whippersnappers amongst you who can’t imagine the significance of that Twin Peaks glass wall, I’ll spell it out: Major. Statement. Of Pride.  At a time when folks still had very recent memories of police harassment in these selfsame bars.  Stonewall, after all, was a scant four years earlier.

I have another friend who used to bartend there (a gal), who said it used to be nicknamed “the glass casket” or the “tomb with a view,” due to the advanced years of the average patron.  Needless to say, come the AIDS pandemic, these nicknames took on a new meaning.

I had to take a picture of the fam-damily here. Partly, I liked the criss-crossey streetcar wires coming out of everyone’s heads. Partly I like how my beloved appears to have stepped out of a giant, inspirational, Soviet propaganda poster. With more time I’d do a version of this with outsize all-caps words coming out of her mouth in huge Bauhaus font.  Something along the lines of “I can only stand like this for so long pretending to look at something in the middle distance, honey!”

Also, this intersection figures into our early courtship. At a “Pink Saturday” party once — they block off this portion of Castro Street; a truckbed DJ sets up a sound system and people dance and dance in the streets, as well they should — the beloved and I Made Some Memories.  The contrast, now over a decade later, mit kids, tickles me fancy. 

As payment for splashing the beloved up there, here’s me mit selfsame kids at selfsame locale: Harvey Milk Plaza.  Basket is Lil’ Red’s, natch.

After the movie, we got some picnic fare and went to the island on Golden Gate Park’s Stowe Lake. Like magic, a pagoda appeared, empty inside, with a table and little marble stools around it.  I’m tellin’ you, when you have kids along, just about anything, including gobs and gobs of pigeon guano, can become magical.

Look dear, there’s some pigeon guano now! Also, twenty-eight (count ‘em! 28!) elaborately painted dragons. Okay, so that was what she was looking at. Truth be told it was only Baba who was fixated by the pigeon guano.

Silly Baba.

On our slow peregrination back to the car, the girlchild picked up a good half-dozen feathers, over the protestations of one and a half of her parents (you need 100% buy-in for a good, strong opposition, and apparently not everyone sees disease lurking everywhere, like I do).

She brought the feathers home and tried to sell them to passers-by on the sidewalk. Her downstairs cousins are inveterate lemonade-sellers, the little capitalists, and she’s apprenticed with them attentively. Her sign reads: “FETHRZ FOR SAL 10 SES A PENE.” Oops, that doesn’t help. Translation: “Feathers for sale, 10 cents a penny.” I know, I know. It still doesn’t make sense. But I’m not about to split hairs with her over pricing.

Business was very slow. But the day was very good.

Under what circumstances would a jumpy Baba happily let her son run smack down the middle of the street? Block party!

Yes, Baba’s Day was all I might have wanted it to have been. That and more, on which I will expound later.

Meanwhile, predating Baba’s Day this weekend was: Block Party!  We have some neighbors who, once they found how easy it was to block off the street ($15 and an affable city functionary who always seems to go: “Sure!”), couldn’t stop doing it. They’re moving soon, and I think one of the main criteria for their replacements needs to be a propensity to block car traffic from the street and encourage neighbors to exit their houses and get to know one another (again).

Solo dance, Berkeley, CA.

For a split-second she actually grimaced at the camera, in an attempt to “smile” for it. Don’t know where she learned that craziness; certainly not from me.   So instead I said, “How ’bout just look serious at it.” Which she effortlessly obliged.

Best wishes this weekend to those of you celebrating Father’s Day this Sunday — or Baba’s Day, as we do in our household. I got an iron griddle and a spatula and a pancake mixing bowl last year, pretty much the best possible Baba’s Day gift I could imagine.  This year, I can imagine something even more luxurious, more blessed: another morning’s opportunity to use them on these people, after waking up to them and my beloved.

That, right there, is the moon and back.

An ordinary ending to a day which began as many probably do, for many people, all over the world. Meaning, with the breathtakingly unexpected.  

As I watch my daughter dance after dinner to  Swan Lake, (here, Suite 4: Scene (White Swan), I know (again) how profoundly fortunate I am for the existence of her, of her brother, and of my beloved. Likewise I know they are fortunate for my continued existence.  I don’t tend to think my continued existence is predicated on a great deal more than chance.  But for that, so far, I am thankful.  There but for the grace of God.

The camera body and the lens I took this picture with are both on loan from a dear friend, who herself received them from a dear friend who had died of cancer with six short months’ notice.  Many get far less notice than that.  

Every day I look through Barbara’s lens at my children, and now (’til mine is fixed) I am holding Barbara’s body, too.  I have no idea what to do with that fact, but the symbolism is not lost on me.  At the very least, I try to appreciate the gift.  And what it reminds me of.  

After attending Barbara’s memorial, I wrote:

 I realize that death is, at the very least, camped out in a van across the street, eating donuts and sipping cheap coffee. More likely it’s sitting quietly in every room of the house, discreetly reading the paper, looking up from time to time to cast a watchful eye on the proceedings. Waiting for whomever, whenever.

This realization doesn’t make me more lugubrious. It makes me more loving. I don’t feel morbid; just mindful. And grateful.

Tonight, as I was tucking in my daughter, I added a new twist to the rhetorical question I constantly ask the kids.  

“How much do I love you?” I ask her.

“Sooooooo much,” she answers.  

“And how long will I love you?”

She pauses only as long as it takes for her eye to twinkle. “Forever!”

And I nod long and slow and serious. 

“Will you still remember me when you’re a star, Baba?”

And I nod again, long and slow, and also smile. “Absolutely.”  Which is the God’s honest truth. I know this for a fact.

She asks me how I know, and I tell her. “My mother lets me know,” I say. (”How?”) “I hear her here” — I touch my fingers to my temple — “and feel her here” — and I touch my palm to my heart.

Her eyes twinkle again, and she smiles wide, and says, “You’ll be the first star I see at night.”

It is hypothetical/magical to her, I imagine. Not so to me.  I continue to smile, and nod long and slow. One day, that star — the one which was once my mother to me, then my nephew; the one which to my daughter is our dear old dog, now gone – one day, that star will be me.  I try in my ways to prepare her, her brother, and my beloved for the breathtakingly unexpected (a task which forgetfulness makes Sisyphean). All I can really hope for, as Mary Oliver writes, is this:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was
a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”