Thursday, June 24, 2010

A June Wedding

On Friday, Iris and I will be driving up to Oregon for our niece's wedding to a nice young man we met last November when they joined us, with her parents, for Thanksgiving.

Weddings, as I'm sure you know, bring up lots of feelings for many people. Even our 24-year-old son is twitching a bit this summer as he goes to two weddings of people his own age: this cousin now, and, in August, one of his buddies from Berkeley High.

For me, attending a straight wedding always brings up the whole marriage equality batch of thoughts and feelings. I can't help it. Indeed, just getting to this wedding will involve us temporarily losing our legal married status, as we'll be crossing state lines.

This will be, of course, a June wedding. I myself liked the idea of being a June bride, so the first time I married Iris (1992), we too picked a June date. Stonewall Day, actually, the anniversary of the day in 1969 when a bunch of angry New York queens stood up to the cops and said, "We've had enough." As it happens, Iris and I have also been February brides (2004) and September brides (2008).

Our legal right to marry just in our own state is a matter of hot contention right now, and in the fullness of time, it will likely be taken all the way to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, off to a little town outside of Medford, OR, we go. There, no one will question the right of these two young people to marry, and they will stay married when they cross the line into California where they plan to live.

We will go to this wedding, and we will rejoice for them. We will also be holding our own story inside of us.

I suppose all of the other people witnessing along with us will be doing the same thing with their stories. That's just the way that it is.

Friday, June 18, 2010

The power of the personal; notes from Germany

A trip to a new country leaves one with a great many impressions. The strongest from my recent visit to Germany are connected to personal stories I encountered.

Let me mention first the amazing Holocaust Memorial, more formerly known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Memorial has two parts: an external sculptural placement of 2,711 giant concrete blocks of varying sizes. You can walk through these blocks from any direction, and so they formed a kind of labyrinth. These are 3 photographs I took to give you some idea of the effect: a sense of overwhelming number and individuality of view and experience at the same time.


The information center complimenting the stones adds to this effect with an overview history of the Holocaust but then, importantly, offers a portrait of horrifying deprivation, cruelty and violence in photographs and diaries from fifteen families, each from a different country.

For me, the specificity of this approach made the information sink deeply inside me. In all cases, the photographs from the pre-oppression period showed healthy, glowing faces at various family gatherings. And these served to bring the photographs from later times into exacting and sharp relief. It made quite a difference in impact that every photograph of an individual was identified by name. There were no walls of nameless victims here. Everyone belonged to a family, to a story.

The second experience I want to describe comes from the business part of this trip. For the first two days in Germany, we were in Hannover, where I attended a work-related conference. In addition to the meetings, I was able to have many personal conversations over lunches and dinners with my colleagues from German and Swiss libraries and research institutions. In the process, I began to establish relationships with them, ones that will, of course, grow as we continue to work together.

In these circumstances, we learned a little bit about each other. For instance, I discovered that German children are taught the American Pilgrim story. I was surprised by this, I have to admit. I still find it puzzling. When I, in turn, explained that Thanksgiving is a good holiday for Americans because it is not tied to any particular religious tradition, this was a new idea for Wolfgang and Anja, who explained that Germany is a Christian country. (There you have it.)

For their part, Wolfgang and Anja asked about the wall between the United States and Mexico. They wanted to know how long it is, and whether it stretches all the way from Texas to California. I realized, as they were talking, that Germans understand about walls. They also wanted to know if we had a trade agreement with Mexico, and, if so, why there wasn't free movement between the two countries as there is in Europe between members of the European Union.  Now, Germany is not a country without immigration issues of its own, of course, but I didn't bring this up. Instead, I was just interested to hear how the United States is seen from the outside.

I was walking back from an evening reception on the first night of the conference with a colleague from Switzerland, Angela, and another German, Stefan. Angela said something along the lines of "What I want to know is, we just love President Obama. Why don't you?" Stefan agreed that, yes, he had this same question. I made a response I don't think really satisfied either of them, though what can you say to something like that, actually?

As a side note, I observed this pro-Obama feeling elsewhere in Germany: at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, there is a President Kennedy Museum and Shop. In the big picture window right now, there is a huge poster of President Obama.

One last snapshot: every time we opened a map on the streets of Berlin, someone stepped forward and asked if we wanted help. Most notably, on our first afternoon, as we walked down Welserstrasse with a map, a woman stopped to help us. When she found out it was our first visit and first day, she asked us what we were interested in seeing and gave us what ended up being the outline for our full 3 days.

I'll remember her a long time.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Happy Gay Pride Month!

There's a real thrill for me when I come up out of any downtown San Francisco BART station in June. All along Market Street, the big rainbow flags are flying, and it is a site to see.

For many years, my family marched up Market Street on the last Sunday in June, especially when our son was a little boy. We marched with the LGBT Parenting contingent, and it was an absolute balm to get all those cheers! When Nathan was little, the kids' groups were lined up right after the groups for people with HIV-AIDS, and in the late eighties and early nineties, those groups were pretty grim looking. By the time the children came along, I suspect that the crowds were really looking for a sign that life was going to carry on.

At the time, I really needed the boost too. I often felt like I was holding it together all year long as a lesbian mom, more or less in conflict with my family of origin, and so for this one day in June to have tens of thousands of people cheering for me was truly wonderful.

The rainbow flags remind me of all of this.

I saw them this week as when I went into San Francisco to get euros for our trip to Germany. We're leaving on Saturday the 5th and returning late on Saturday the 11th, so there will be an interruption in my posting next week.

It's a business trip to Hanover with a pleasure trip to Berlin added onto the end. Amazingly, when we get to Berlin, we will land smack dab into the middle of Europe's biggest Gay Pride Week!

So, we'll celebrate in a whole new way this year. I've already learned something new, which is that lesbian in German is lesbisch. How about that!
 

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