Takoma Pride
Takoma Pride is always the first Sunday in June, which was the very first day of June this year, so Pride Month started off with a joyful celebration. It’s a small event, compared to Pride in the city, but I was surprised at how big it was this year, more crowded than I’ve ever seen it. I think there’s a reason for that.
We got there early so Beth could visit the farmers’ market in the parking lot just behind the block where the booths were located. North and I stood in a long line to get coffee and a blueberry-rhubarb pastry to split at Takoma Beverage Company. While we waited for our order, North asked me. “Are you proud?”
I said yes. I am proud to have been out for almost thirty-eight years, and to have come out at time when it was harder for young people to come out than it is now, but I am also disillusioned to be seeing cultural backlash, especially against trans kids.
Ever since I was a mostly closeted teen, it has always seemed that the LGBTQ+ community was seeing progress, sometimes agonizingly slow, sometimes surprisingly quick (as during the exciting years when gay marriage was legalized in first a handful of states and then all of them). But now we are moving backward in ways big and small. I think that’s why so many people turned out to our little pride festival this year. People want to feel seen, perhaps more urgently than we did just last year.
We watched the parade. Bikers and roller skaters were in front, followed by the members of the Rainbow Club of two local elementary schools. Our Congressional representative Jamie Raskin was walking with the kids. There were trans people with paper mâché butterflies (symbols of transformation presumably), people with signs (“Love Wins. Hate Loses”), and people dressed as fairies.
We chatted with people we knew. North’s friend Rose, who was a counselor at Girl Scout camp with them last summer was there, as were her two younger sisters and their parents, Sara (a former colleague of Beth’s) and Mike (the filmmaker who occasionally employs Noah). Mike had brought his portable sound system with him—he’s been taking it to Tesla protests every weekend apparently—and he was playing Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” and other tunes. “It’s a whole project now,” Rose wryly commented of the sound system. The family dog was getting in on the action, too, wearing a rainbow harness.
We perused the booths. North got a pamphlet from Trans Maryland with information they hoped might help them sort out their passport dilemma. Beth and I posed in front of a photo op background made of multicolored fabric. She held up the rainbow chard she had bought at the farmers’ market—even the vegetables were proud that day. Beth peeled off to get a tomato cage from the hardware store while North and I continued to browse the booths, scootching past very long lines for ice cream and face painting. We all met up at the end of the block of booths and headed home.
That night, after a dinner of rainbow chard and tofu stir-fry, Beth and I went to a Pride concert at Rhizome, an art space in Takoma, DC. (Explainer for nonlocals—Takoma is a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that borders Takoma Park, Maryland.) There were five bands playing, but we only stayed for the first two because we are early-to-bed people and we did not want to turn into pumpkins. Luckily, the first band that played was Ammonite, who we saw at the Takoma Park Folk Festival last September. This was the band Beth most wanted to see.
Between Prides
The next week, three of us were working, as Noah was editing a promotional video for a solar energy company for Mike. He worked on it for a couple weeks—it’s the longest gig he’s had since November, so I was happy to see him employed. North had the week off from their Environment Virginia canvassing job (yes, they got it) because they were going to the beach with five friends from high school, all except North graduating seniors. They left on Tuesday, but North took Monday off, too, so they could pack and rest before the trip. Canvassing is physically taxing, which combined with the late hours, is why when they got another job, working at a day camp in DC, they decided to take it. They will keep the canvassing job until late June when the camp job starts. Meanwhile, Beth went to the veterans’ protest on the Mall on Friday, but I skipped it because Sara and I had a rush job that week writing web copy for a line of probiotics.
That’s why I was home Friday morning when the workers found the nest in our porch roof. We are having the porch roof rebuilt and when they removed a sheet of plywood, they found a nest with several tiny pink babies with sparse gray down and big yellow beaks. I suspected they were starlings because of something that happened about a week earlier.
I’d walked into the kitchen and found both cats on the stovetop looking up. I paused, listening, and heard a rustling sound in the cabinet above the range hood. Thinking mouse, I opened it to have a look and much to my surprise (but perhaps not the cats’) a starling flew out.
Pandemonium broke out with the bird swooping around and the cats running after it. It took two people (me to remove the cats from the room and Beth to open the back door and a window for the bird to exit) to restore order. Further examination uncovered a vent pipe in that cabinet with a hole in it. (We had the workers take a look and they said the mesh covering the venting slats on the side of the house was torn so we put replacing that on their to-do list.)
I did a little research, and the nestlings did look like baby starlings, plus it was the right kind of nesting location, time of year, and number of babies (four to five—they were huddled together too close to count), so that’s still my hypothesis.
As the porch roof where the nest was built was dissembled, the workers relocated it first to the porch wall and then to the ledge the doves use in the early spring. I thought there was no way the parents would find it and the babies were doomed. I spent a lot of the morning fruitlessly trying to find a wildlife rehabilitator who would take them. I just kept getting passed from the Humane Society to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to a rescue organization that turned out to be for raptors, to one that took songbirds, but only native ones, and I learned starlings are not native.
Then in the afternoon, noticing the nestlings had perked up, I started to wonder if the parents did find them and had fed them. I was checking on them every few hours and sometimes they seemed lively and sometimes listless. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was emotionally exhausting. But when we went to bed and when we got up the next morning, they were all alive.
Unfortunately, by early afternoon Saturday, two of them had died. I asked Noah to dig a hole in the back yard so we could bury them as soon as they were all dead. By this point I was hoping it would happen sooner rather than later or that a predator would put them out of their misery. I even wondered if I should move the nest somewhere more visible to speed that along, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to because I was still half-entertaining the possibility that the parents were feeding them. They were so tiny, and it had been over a day by that point. How could any of them they still be alive otherwise?
Well, I never saw any parent birds at the nest, and by mid-morning Sunday, the last one had died and all but two of the dead bodies had disappeared from the nest, taken by a scavenger maybe? Beth and I buried the whole nest in the hole Noah dug. The nest itself was much better constructed than a mourning dove nest and surprisingly large with just a tiny cavity for the babies. In my time as a suburban homeowner, I have learned a lot about different species of birds and their nesting habits.
I am sad about the way it ended, and not very proud of myself. It was a slow death, and they must have suffered. I keep wondering if I could have done something differently, mostly tried harder to find a rehabilitator, I guess. I never seriously considered learning how to feed them myself because I didn’t want to end up with four to five tame starlings unable to fend for themselves.
DC World Pride
World Pride was in D.C. this year. There were all kinds of events, but the second weekend of June there were three main ones—the parade, the street festival, and a political march. Since the march was unique to this year, and we’ve done the parade and the festival many times, Beth and I decided to do the march.
Various labor unions were meeting up at the AFL-CIO building for a pre-march rally, so went there. People gathered in the Solidarity Room, which is a long rectangular space with windows along one long wall and a beautiful tile mosaic, much like the one in the lobby, depicting various scenes of labor, along the other. We were in the room over an hour listening to speeches by leaders of various unions, including Randi Weingarten from the American Federation of Teachers, who joined via video call. Many of the speakers talked about intersectionality, which made sense because the event itself was intersectional. Two people from SEIU spoke about the alarming events in Los Angeles and the detention of David Huerta.
We also heard from people organizing at Starbucks, a local restaurant, and the Kennedy Center. Beth said she never gets tired of hearing from young organizers. I also like hearing from gay people older than us, especially when they talk about their lives, which have seen even more change than ours. As Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, reminded us, “Unimaginable rapid change is possible,” both good changes and bad ones. I know that. I’ve been witness to both.
We left the building to meet up with the larger march a little after one. It had started raining while we were inside and I had to juggle my umbrella, my sign, and a tote bag containing food, water and other necessities (backpacks were not allowed), so I didn’t take as many pictures as I might have otherwise. The crowd was moderate-sized and spirited. There was drumming and chanting. One of the more unusual chants was “What do we want? David! When do we want him? Now!” Of course it was referring to David Huerta, but I was thinking David is such a common name there must be at least one in the crowd who was feeling rather amused.
Once we got to the Washington Monument and away from the shelter of tall buildings it was much windier, and I started to get sprayed with rain from the side. We proceeded to the mall where we crossed paths with a different protest, a queer pro-Palestinian one. We stopped there and it wasn’t clear if that was going to be the end point. We never met up with the larger march, having left the AFL-CIO too late. Beth and I decided to head home. We skirted along the edge of the street festival as we walked to the Metro. There was music playing, and people coming in and out, so the rain didn’t shut it down the celebration either.
As I said to Beth on the way home, you go to these things and sometimes they are big and sometimes they are small, and sometimes the sound system works and you hear the speeches and sometimes it doesn’t and you don’t, and sometimes you find the event you intended to attend and sometimes you don’t. But we made our own event, I suppose, and being in different places, maybe more people saw the disjointed parts of the march than would have if they’d been together. I am trying to look on the bright side here and to see the rainbows in the rain.