Rockin' the Pumpkin Festival

In the afternoon, I drive back to Half Moon Bay from Santa Rosa where the Bioneers conference was held, and I go to the Pumpkin Festival, Half Moon Bay’s big annual claim to fame, with my parents. The Pumpkin Festival covers the entire Main Street with booths of crafty and novelty items, a food court full of pumpkin-flavored items and other foods to benefit different coastside groups, a large stage predominately dominated with bad acid rock groups, but sometimes featuring great bands covering the golden oldies, the Bank of America parking lot converted into a kids’ carnival replete with pumpkin pie eating contests, bean bag tosses, and face painting, and this year the added novelty of Nokia and Sony semi trucks filled with gaming machines and software expos, and a Starbucks booth—corporations encroach on small town fun, even in good old HMB. This year, the Pumpkin Festival was even featured on several radio stations and they ran advertisements for it that sounded very yuppified, if you ask me… but nobody really did ask me… We stroll down the street and arrive at Ocean Books, which is owned by the editor of the Salt Reader, Madeline, who is outside tabling for the Democrats and the Kerry campaign, and who has been handing out Codepink info that my mom and I copied for her (well, actually, my mom did all the copying- she made an incredible donation to Codepink by offering to copy hundreds of bright pink fliers for us!). The Democrats inform me that they have registered over 600 new voters that weekend at the Pumpkin Festival!

I see Larkin Evans, a phenomenal art teacher who used to run the peer counseling program at the local high school, an outstanding, and in my opinion essential, program which has since been cut from the curriculum due to budget constraints. Larkin is very supportive of Codepink and has supported me in ways not fully describable since I had her as a teacher in high school; she is an angelic and fiercely graceful woman. We get pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread and I hand out a lot of Codepink fliers throughout the whole parade, and a Peaceful Police Officer button to a cop. I run into my friend Robbie, who went to high school with me, and he is wearing a “Viva Bush” sticker, which he says his mom put on him. I convince him to take a Codepink flier and an extra one for his parents, and I give him a “pink slip Bush” sticker. He is uneasy about it, but I assure him that his dad doesn’t need to know exactly who he really votes for on Nov. 2. Right before I am about to go mad with crowd claustrophobia, a thick rain erupts and drenches everything. I think it is a welcome rain and I dance in it, finally having space to move as the streets clear out with everyone dashing into the sellers’ booths. I find a lion pendant at a bead shop stand and it reminds me of the YOE-LIONS (www.yoe-lions.org) vision, so I feel compelled to buy it as a sort of good luck charm or future gift. We make our way back to the car and journey home through the traffic.