Parade, bis

Attending a huge celebration party in San Francisco the day after the Republicans took back the house was maybe the best way to deal with it. (The Republicans bombed in California, though Prop. 19 failed, the move to legalize marijuana, but you’d never know it from the way the city smelled all day long…) The cops were cool — I even caught one dancing to a drum beat for a few bars — and for a party of a million people it was fairly mellow. Yes, people were drinking. But mostly there was just this incredulous delirium, a dream in orange and black.

Yesterday I found out my director’s husband went out and bought twenty copies of the SF Chronicle dated Nov. 2 and put them on the graves of his parents, his grandparents, uncles and cousins. Giants fans from before they even moved to San Francisco, caught up in the Giants farm team. It’s like what happened in Boston in 2004. I am sure lots of these stories will emerge.

We were waiting at the BART station for the rest of our party to show up at the end of the day, still sketching. I said I thought the mix of people we had seen was interesting. The obvious multiracial blend, but many more Latinos, fewer African Americans than I had expected, though there were plenty. Many of them wore Mays, McCovey, Bonds shirts. Mays and McCovey drew deafening cheers as they went by in the invisible cable cars; Bonds wasn’t there.

Numenius paused for a second and said you know, Bonds is kind of like our Moses. Leading us to the Promised Land but not allowed to go there himself because of his transgressions.

So I will take this opportunity to say thank you, Barry Bonds. Prickly and chosen and transgressing. Because you helped make Wednesday possible… and it was a hella good party.