Down by the Riverside

I was fourteen years old when I heard this song and sang it for the first time.

I was a freshman in high school in northern Colorado. There was a protest in Cheyenne, Wyoming, against the MX missiles that Ronald Reagan wanted to deploy as "protection" against the Soviet Union.

I saw a sign somewhere about the protest, and something in me clicked. I had to go. Religious people talk about being called, and for the first time, I felt like I was being called to do something. I had to go to this protest. I needed to.

I didn't own a car, so I hitchhiked up north to Wyoming. (My dad knew, and he was good with it. My brother was hitchhiking around the country - how bad could it be hitchhiking fifty miles north?) And I found my people. We drove together to one of the missile silos that dotted the prairie in Wyoming. We were a small group, and there were a lot of people in their forties and fifties. At fourteen, I was the youngest person there, but I was welcomed.

And we sang. And we talked about the insanity of waging war for the sake of peace. And we sang some more. Because that's what people do when they're together. They sing. We raise our voices together and find our harmony and find our common bond.

I have never forgotten that day. Standing, hand in hand, surrounding a nuclear missile silo with love and song and our wishes for peace. It made me who I am, that moment. And Pete Seeger's songs were there.

Jim Hightower, who knew Pete Seeger for over forty years, said it best. "It never occurred to me that Pete Seeger could die, for I thought of him as a permanent piece of America--like the Bill of Rights."

This was a man who met with Occupy Wall Street protestors, and who stood up to Joe McCarthy's red baiting. He sang songs of protest for over seventy years. He wasn't especially rich, didn't have an entourage, didn't cause earthquakes of damage and destruction behind him. He was a man with a banjo, who brought people together with song. And he did it again, and again, and again.

He wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

He wrote "Turn, Turn, Turn." (Well, he adapted it from Ecclesiastes, but he did that. And what a profound thing to do, to turn a chapter of the Bible into one of the finest peace songs on the planet.)

He wrote "If I Had a Hammer." Doesn't that seem like a song that has always existed? But someone had to bring that metaphor into life, and Pete Seeger did it.

He wrote "Little Boxes." If you've ever seen an episode of "Weeds," you know that song. It's one of my dad's favorite songs.

He helped to adapt old spirituals into the song "We Shall Overcome." He's given songwriting credit for it, but he refused to accept royalties for the song. Instead, all of the royalties go to a center in Tennessee that trains the leaders of tomorrow.

He lived his life and his ideals out loud, for the world to see. He was not a perfect man, as none of us are. But goddamn if he wasn't a man worth admiring. I loved Pete Seeger and admired him and cried for him when he died. For my loss, and the world's loss.

The best thing we can all do to honor Pete Seeger is to lift our voices together. He spent his life fighting for a world of peace, a world of harmony and love and care for each other. Let us all recommit ourselves to bringing Pete Seeger's vision into reality.

Mutt Like Me

I didn't cry until this morning.

I've gotten emotional this week, of course. Tuesday night was amazing. I watched Obama's victory speech in awe and astonishment. But I never cried until today, watching his first post-election press conference.

Oddly enough, it was a question about dogs. He has promised his girls a dog if they move into the White House, and he was asked a light-hearted question about the kind of dog they were considering. And he said that he needed to consider getting a hypoallergenic dog because one of his girls is allergic.

But he then said that his preference was to get a dog from a shelter, and "most shelter dogs are mutts like me." I pumped my fist and cheered. And then I got misty-eyed.

Barack Obama is a mutt. He's a mixture, a hybrid, a biracial blend. He is both black and white, Kenyan and Hawaiian and Kansan, a swirl of cultures all at once.

I know something about this.

My father is 1st-generation Mexican-American, by which I mean that his parents were Mexican-born. He was born in Michigan, an American citizen although his father never became a naturalized citizen. He grew up speaking Spanish and English.

My mother was French-Canadian and English, from western Massachusetts. When they married and he came to New England to meet her family, he found them all staring anxiously out the window as he approached. They had never seen a Mexican person before, you see, and they couldn't wait to see what he looked like.

My childhood was a mixture of identities. I was never white, but never as dark as the pure Mexican kids in my neighborhood. I was in-between. I had a Spanish last name, but I couldn't speak Spanish beyond perro and gato. I was a typical American kid in most respects, I like to think: cable tv, video games, Sesame Street. And yet, there was that other thing that was so inconsequential and yet set me apart from the other kids on my block. I was different.

When I was thirteen, my family moved to a rural town in Colorado and I had to adjust to a whole new speed of living. I went from city life to a farm town. I adjusted well, learned to love country music and the Denver Broncos. I found many friends, graduated near the top of my class. I was in six plays in four years, played two years of high school baseball, won my first writing contest.

I believe today that because of my in-betweenness, I learned to drift and float between cultures and identities. Because I was always something in-between, I learned how to adapt to people who weren't exactly like me and assimilate myself to be just like them. As long as I needed to - until I needed to adapt to another group for an hour or a week or a year.

There were Mexican kids in my school who were low-riders, dropouts, drifters. There were also kids who were great students, cheerleaders, football stars. They weren't like each other, and none of them was like me, and I wasn't like any of them. I was someone who moved into town just in time to start 9th grade. I was an outsider as the new kid, the different kid. And then I was just me.

When I look at Barack Obama, I see a life story like mine. I was born in Michigan to a father whose parents were born in another country. He was born in Hawaii to a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya. I grew up a half-Mexican kid in Detroit and rural Colorado. He grew up a black kid in Honolulu and Indonesia.

I hear all these stories about how he crosses party lines, how well he works with political opponents, how he befriends his enemies. We do that. We see things from outside, always from outside, always sampling the other person's point of view. We wear different perspectives as a matter of course. We are always looking for the perspective that hasn't been expressed, for the point of view that isn't being noticed, the middle ground between the warring factions. We blend, and we try to bring together the seemingly irreconcilable as a matter of habit.

I have voted for presidents every year since 1988, and this is the first time I have been happy with my pick. No, more than that. I was overjoyed to select the name of Barack Hussein Obama to be my next president. He is of my generation - just eight years older than me. He is a parent of young children, like me. Like me, he married someone beautiful and intelligent and his equal, if not his better, in nearly every way. (Hi, sweetie.)

But it's deeper. Barack Obama has that complicated, hard-to-explain life story that I recognize all too well. He's several things all at once. He is at once African-American and white and neither of those things. He is a blend, multiracial, like me. He's a drifter between worlds, like me. He's a mutt, just like me, just like millions of Americans.

He's one of us.

Red Sox 4, Rockies ... um ... Zero

Well, so much for that.

The Red Sox are this year's champions. They pummeled the Rockies, fair and square, in four straight games. You can't say the Rockies didn't fight - they threw a couple of good scares into the Red Sox, especially in game three, when they clawed their way back (almost) from a 6-0 deficit.

But then the Sox scored another three runs. And then another one for good measure.

The Rockies kept trying to fight back, only to be squashed again and again. But give them credit for fighting.

I live in Seattle, and I feel a little bit like a bandwagoner - at least I feel like some people might accuse me of that. But I can legitimately claim the Rockies as one of my teams. I've seen them live, after all. I saw them before Coors Field existed, back when they were playing in Mile High Stadium (the first one, not the new Invesco Field or whatever). And I saw them back when Vinny Castilla and Andres Gallaraga and Dante Bichette were the Blake Street Bombers - lots of home runs, not so much with the wins.

Mrs. B and I had been going out for only nine months when we took a road trip from Seattle to Denver. We saw the sights: the badlands in Wyoming, Grand Tetons National Park, and Rocky Mountain N.P. in Colorado. And we want to see the Rockies at Coors Field.

I've been following these boys since their first season. I remember their history. I haven't been following them much this year, but watching them now brings back all the memories from their early years. I'm thrilled for their success, regardless of the World Series outcome. The Rockies are a hell of a team. They've got a great group of players who all play as a team and pull for each other. They've developed a spirit of winning and camaraderie that has turned the Rockies into a serious contender.

They'll be back.

There will be pennants won in the future. Matt Holliday have a couple more MVP seasons. There are superstars in the making on that team.

The Rockies will be back in the World Series. They have to go back and avenge themselves.

Congrats Red Sox! (Who my wife was rooting for the whole time - even though she hasn't watched an inning of baseball all season.)

Red Sox 1, Rockies 0

Things to remember:

• It's a seven-game series. Winning by twelve runs does not give you an automatic lead in any of the next six games.
• If they were going to lose, it was going to happen against Beckett.
• The Rockies hadn't played a live baseball team for eight days. Now they have, and they've got their blood flowing again. Scrimmages and practice sessions are no substitute for the real thing.
• They got embarrassed last night. This is the most important thing to me. Last night left them bruised, battered, and embarrassed. A team in that condition is a dangerous team to face.

The Rockies hadn't lost in over five weeks before last night's debacle. Now they remember what it feels like to lose. They also might be remembering that feeling of ... well, failure. The Colorado Rockies have been also-rans since their inaugural season in 1995. Now that they got spanked in their first World Series game, pundits and commentators all around the country are questioning whether they even deserve to be there. (This came out before game 1, but here's a particularly noxious column savaging the Rockies.) So they've got something to prove - again, that only makes them a more dangerous team.

The Red Sox are feeling proud, cocky, confident. The Rockies are feeling angry, humiliated, and hungry for revenge.

Advantage: Rockies.

Let's see if they can bounce back tonight and make it a series.

Rockies win!!!

I don't believe it. I just watched the game unfold on ESPN's GameCast, and I still can't believe they won.

The Colorado Rockies won their one-game playoff with the San Diego Padres in 13 innings. They were tied after 12 innings. They fell behind by two runs in the top of the 13th. And then they came roaring back, scoring two quick runs and completing the comeback with a sacrifice fly. Game over.

They did it for the fans who were lined up at 7 a.m., filling every parking spot on Blake Street. They did it for the folks who hold up the purple Helton sign underneath the Rockpile on anonymous summer nights. They did it for Ed the parking attendant who didn't have to tell the arriving players what he wanted for his birthday. They did it for those who didn't leave after four hours, whose voices were gone from screaming and arms cramped from clapped.