Pride and Photo Friday

Today was Pride in our borough. Big City Pride is in a few weeks, but I haven't been in years now. It has become corporate (most disturbing because so many of the corporate floats are alcohol-related) and, to me at least, unmanageably big. So I especially love Borough Pride. This was its seventh year. It takes place outside our front door, conveniently enough. There's a stage in the park, and a small area called "Kidspace" where families put down blankets and listen to the music. (I got teary-eyed thinking that next year, God willing, we'll be there with Flipper.) There's a street fair all day, with tons of cheesy street fair stuff, but also plenty of political tables and other queer-related information. People of all sorts come to the fair, in many ways it's just a party for the borough, and I love seeing Orthodox Jews, straight couples with their kids, people speaking all manner of languages, all perfectly happy to be out partying with the queers.

Maggie at the Pride street fair always reminds me of Templeton at the county fair. She scoured the ground for treats and got lots of attention. We unexpectedly bought Flipper his/her first onesie (that we paid for). We haven't been tempted to buy anything baby-related at all, and we already have a bag of hand-me-downs in the living room and more coming...but this item was a necessity. It's navy blue with the name of our borough in green, spelled out using the symbols you see in the link.

The actual parade is at night, which is a fun switch-up. Lots of kids running around with glow sticks and rainbow paraphenalia. We marched with our congregration. The whole neighborhood comes out to watch, sitting on stoops and balconies and fire escapes, hanging out windows, lined up on the street corners and sitting in outdoor cafes. There are no barricades, so as Jennifer was remembering about her own city's Pride in the past, you can still run up and say hi to friends along the way, and jump in and out of the parade (I remember when Big City Pride used to be that way, but it's been a while).

This morning at services, our rabbi announced Co's pregnancy and publicly wished us "B'shaa tova." (That literally means "May it come at a good hour" and, according to my Israeli cousin, is a wish for the baby to be born at an auspicious time. In modern Jewish superstition it means, don't say Mazel Tov 'til the baby cries.) So Flipper was welcomed by our Jewish community.

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For Photo Friday, we decided to show you the back of our front door, because it's more interesting than the front. This is the door harp my mom and her husband gave us for our wedding.



The door harp is a tradition in my family. My mom read, and passed on to me, a book called Davita's Harp. (I wholeheartedly recommend it.) The door harp is a potent image in the book, so when we saw a crafts vendor selling them at our annual folk festival, Mom and I were excited to buy one. I was ten. (Just to clarify, I did not actually read the book for several more years, it's not a book for a ten-year-old.) That harp hung on the door of childhood homestead #2 until my mom sold it after my parent's divorce, ten years ago. My peripatetic (not to say unstable) mother has lived in six homes since then, and the door harp was mostly up, though I realize as I write this that I haven't seen it in her new place. I hope she still has it. Anyway, Co and I gave my sister and her husband a door harp when they got married, and then Mom gave one to us. Mom calls it a secular mezuzah.