It's hard to explain how it happens, the realization that passes over you but I'll try. I asked her to play something off the new album, and she obliged, said that the song was called, City Hall. I thought to myself that it must be about politics, but that's not the whole story, not by a long shot.
Five hundred miles and we're gonna to make it all the way.A family friend of mine has a budding clothing line and I was at a trunk show in Berkeley to support her. C. loves her stuff so, of course, I had to find something to buy. As an added bonus Vienna Teng was going to show up and play a few songs. I've been a big fan ever since I saw her doing a show at the local Borders, and so the combination was irresistible.
Me and my baby been through a lot of good and bad.I remember sitting with some friends talking about it. B_______ said how she had joined her friends in line to wait, said how beautiful it all was. And how angry the situation made her. I didn't think much of it at the time. I could only think how politically inconvenient it was and would end up being. I remember listening to a senator, months later, on NPR defend what the interviewer called a "wedge issue." He said, "We didn't make it an issue, they did."
Outside they're handing out donuts and pizza piesI consider myself lucky to have a few friends that are gay. I remember talking about one of the couples with a mutual friend. He said that he had tried to convince them to drive up. Who knew how long it would last? They had declined, they were practical, what difference did it make? Besides there was always Canada. On one of my birthdays, they had joined me in Vegas, and I had driven back with them to LA. Over the years I had stayed on their couch once, maybe twice. I had always thought of them as a couple, but it wasn't until then that I realized how committed they were.
Ten years waitin' for this moment of fateAnd so I found myself sitting there, listening to the song for the first time and I realized what it was about. I recalled B_______'s story. I thought of my friends in LA. I had missed the real point, I had only thought of it in terms of politics, not in terms of people. She wasn't singing about just some political protest at City Hall, she was singing about people I knew. And I cried. Perhaps, because it was a braver thing than I've ever done and it had taken me too long to realize. Or perhaps because I knew that her song had got it just right.
So, oh oh ohClark's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
In the shade of a Spanish Mission and beneath a Santa Cruz sky, we met the blushing bride in all her glory as she was whisked away to hide. We have been occasional friends for a long time now, meeting up only on a blue moon, neither time nor distance being a real obstacle. She had always been the tomboy, favoring comfortable shoes and casual clothing and exercising all manner of reason and practicality in her everyday living. Yet on this day, she was dressed in luxurious white, bejeweled and look very much like a princess. It was her day, after all, to be glamourous.
Strangely, the words glamour, grammar, and grimoire share the same etymology, deriving from the old french, gramaire. In the Middle Ages, books of gramaer were used to instruct the intelligentsia. These same books were viewed by the illiterate majority as occult magic. And so while we think of glamourous as a property of starlets, socialites and royalty, it was originally and attribute of priests, scholars and witches.
The tools one uses to transform an everyday woman into a bride are common today. They sell the jewelry on cable television and it's almost impossible to navigate a department store without traversing the cosmetic section. By no means would anyone consider any of this advanced technology (though the marketing departments for cosmetic companies may beg to differ.) And yet, for all that, there is something very magical in that transformation. So, it might have been a trick of the light or some slight-of-hand, but I think I might have missed the moment where the dream became the reality.
Walking along Union Street last Saturday we came across several booths pedaling kiddie wares. One of these was a growth chart that you could attach a cute, padded character (airplane, dolphin, whatever fit the theme) at the appropriate height. Back when I was still growing up and not just growing older, my mom used to have me stand against a particular wall in the house and she would take a pencil and mark off my height, along with the date. I remember that I wanted to be measured all the time, to see how much I had grown. These days measurement usually means wrapping a flexible tape measure around my waist, or stepping on to a scale. And I'm not dying to do either very often.
This past weekend we started our project to repaint the interior of the house. We finished primering on Sunday and throughout the week I've been putting on coats of paint -- C's been at her sister's helping out with household chores and playing with the baby. I've put off doing any real work on it for 3 years. I suppose I was afraid of commitment. Now that I've left my mark in velvety merlot, I kinda like it.
There's been a lot going on in this very small mind of mine and all the rooms still need a fresh coat of paint. There are a lot of things I have planned for my twenties and there's awfully little time to be doing them. I'm looking forward to the next decade, I really am. Just not yet, just not yet.