It's Indescribable

It's been a busy weekend Chez Muscato - just the most ordinary sorts of things, really.  The Mister is working weekends these days, and so I'm taking on a little of the weekend cooking (meatloaf, a house speciality, and a genuine success on this outing), as well as getting clothes to to the dry cleaners, giving the dogs a nice long weekend constitutional, grocery-getting, just the most quotidian of goings-on.

Tonight, though, we wandered downtown and were reminded for what might as well have been the first time that it was Pride Weekend. Once upon a time that would have been something I couldn't have dreamed of missing - I went to my first Pride March, if memory serves, in 1980, escaping up to Manhattan as a terrified/excited/utterly out of my depth high schooler, and it was genuinely transformative.  All these years later, I confess to being a little more nonchalant about the whole thing, even as the world has changed around me.  We have so much to be proud of, now as we did then.  It's some measure of how far we've come that it all seems so much just another part of life.

It was nice to be downtown, though, even if we had missed the main events, the rainbow flags everywhere and the genial air of people having had inordinate amounts of fun in all the busy streets of Our Nation's Capital.  We had a cocktail or three in our favorite low-ish dive and then went on for dinner in a reliable old pasta joint.  The boys passed by, and the clusters of amiable women, many of both trailing strings of beads and many with shining faces that tomorrow will feel more than a little sunburnt.  We sat, the Mister and me, having a little more wine and some good calamari, and I realized just how proud I really am: of us.  Of all of us, of every brave person I've known and every brave act that brought us to this day, when we're all about to be equally married in every state (what do you think - a year?  Less?), and when even more than that we're claiming our place in the world.

It's our time.  Thank you, Miss Wash; I've loved you since the heady days (and nights) when it was raining men, and I'm awfully glad that you're with us, now that we're basking in the rainbow that follows the rain.