hardly strictly

yesterday we drove across town with the new unhappy maya saying many variations of no and mine and no and my turn and made it to golden gate park without me yelling at the kids to BE QUIET SO I CAN DRIVE. i am proud of myself for this restraint. i was so ready to get out of that car my subconscious tricked me into misreading a streetcleaning sign so we could just park (the gods were with us, no ticket!). maya calms down and we enter the park and see lots of big yellow schoolbuses in front of speedway meadow. this is the special friday morning presentation of the hardly strictly bluegrass festival for san francisco middle schoolers and the general public. we set up a little blanket and watch the kids file off the buses. there are many many of them. they seem pretty happy to be out of school on a sunny friday morning. miles is a killer whale chasing maya and i around the field. soon we are joined my my dad and penny and suling and mike and natalie. poor cranky maya requests night night stroller and actually gets in her stroller and conks out while huge amps are pumping bluegrass music and 4000 middle schoolers are booing their lungs out at a cool supervisor's bad jokes, delivered in a great irish accent (what's the difference between a teacher and a train? the teacher says throw that gum away now and the train says choo. choo. now stop booing me you kids.). a few kids get on stage to breakdance to bluegrass, which is a surprisingly successful cross-cultural experiment. another kid somehow manages to tell this joke on stage --your mother is so stupid she went to the clippers game to get her hair cut. the irish accent we are too far back to see tells him that kind of joke is not nice.

i hear all this from various spots in the woods around the meadow. my dad is jiggling maya's stroller and miles has me all to himself. he is a baby eagle who can't fly yet and is separated from his mother. he is a lost baby raccoon who needs me to catch fish for him. i keep peeping from the woods to see if maya has awoken and almost each time i see another one of my old students from sfusd special ed making their way to the concert on a quiet shortcut path. they are all looking large.

then the person who puts on this huge event says a word or two. and the new sfusd school superintendent. and the parents of the journalist who was murdered, daniel pearl. the school district is declaring his birthday world music for peace day.

i am holding my giant baby eagle on my lap and watching all these big loud happy kids and suddenly find myself crying a little. it's happening a lot lately. my dad asks me if they have events like this in all big cities . he doesn't think a city like baltimore would. i don't know. breakdancing, free bluegrass, middle schoolers in a sunny field, bad funny jokes in an irish accent, the somehow steady sounding parents of a murdered peace-promoting young journalist. this city makes it all come together sometimes.