Yesterday, instead of going to the Pride parade, we let the parade come to us.
It’s really strange living in the new place.
We hung out on the front steps of our (wow, our!) building with a few of Matt’s colleagues, and because we were set back from the sidewalk, we could watch both the parade and the passers-by. We saw lots of shirtless guys with half-exposed G.I. Joe muscles. We saw Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Gifford Miller and Al Sharpton and the Altoids float. We looked for Andy as the Lambda Legal group marched by, but we didn’t see him, even though he was apparently there.
I wish I’d taken a picture from our apartment window as the parade went by, instead of just after it was over, because the view of the crowds was really stunning.
Later at night, we heard boom-boom-booming, so I looked out the apartment window, craned my neck around, and saw fireworks going off at the Pier Dance.
I’m overwhelmed. This is a lot to experience all at once. The shock of finally being a New Yorker, and living on a rather urban street at that, and living right in the neighborhood I used to visit all the time, but I’m THERE without having to take the PATH or subway to get there — and on top of that, the frigging PRIDE PARADE marches right down our street before we’ve even finished unpacking and getting settled. None of this feels real yet. It’s too outlandish to feel real.
Now that we’re in the new place, I’m more eager than ever to get my stuff all moved in — my books and bookshelves and my TV and TV stand and other stuff. And my bedframe is still at my old place, so we’re sleeping on a mattress and boxspring right now. And we don’t have a real couch or a coffee table or cable TV yet.
A little excitement is good, but I hope the place also becomes home – a place we can relax in, cocoon in, a place where I can curl up with a good book instead of feeling like I’m in the midst of everything all the time.
This was clearly an atypical weekend in many ways. Eventually things will settle down, I suppose. I look forward to it.
I was totally there, but maybe inconspicuous because instead of an orange Lambda t-shirt I had a purple Group Marshall t-shirt, and also I was wearing a baseball cap to protect my fair little noggin from the merciless sun yesterday.
That parade is just too fricking long, both in terms of overall distance (although, we certainly had the spectators to fill up the route, wow!) and in terms of participants. I mean, it’s great that it’s so inclusive and AMAZING that there are that many people who want to do it, but as my friends said, after the “Parents of Peruvian Transgendered People” they’d seen enough.
Here’s to halcyon days for you and Matt as you create your nest and make it into your own little refuge ‘far from the madding crowd’….