Good things in a goodbye

Sunday night was the closing the San Francisco Opera's Das Rheingold. It was time for a little cake
and a few goodbyes to people Sophie had grown very fond of, her stage managers.

And while I've grown weary of driving over the bridge and late nights with a young child, Sophie and I both left the opera house basement with a sense of regret. We like that place. We hope she'll be cast again but know it might not be for a while. Children are not featured in many operas for obvious reasons. The next production with a large cast of children is The Bonesetter's Daughter, based on Amy Tan's book. The call went out a while ago . . . for Asian children. Maybe next time.

But the fact that we take a piece of our experience with us was obvious as we left. Sophie stopped at the stage door, looked up at the monitor, which was still broadcasting the continuing performance, and insisted "We have to wait! This is my favorite part!" She bounced back and forth on her toes and hummed a few bars of the music that plays when the bridge comes down and the gods depart. I didn't even know she knew it.

Driving home through the city, tired but happy, we saw that the columns on the front of the Opera House were lit up in rainbow colors for the Gay Pride weekend, always an important event but this year even more so following the California Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage. Could it really be true that marriage will be about love not ideology based on ignorance, hate, and fear? That we are finally moving from intolerance to tolerance and finally to acceptance? Who knows, if this is possible, maybe we will soon have a president who wages peace instead of war and helps heal wounds and divisions. And in spite of all the bad news, I felt a gentle optimism as I watched my child moved by art and a city moved by love.