To Raleigh’s and back

I spend so much time with my own tribe nowadays. You just get used to it, being around your own tribe.
So it was a good, healthy shock to the system to go inside Raleigh’s today in Berkeley and find this other tribe. There were lots of Cal people there in yellow. Lots of folks from Tennessee in yellow too — a slightly different yellow, I’m guessing. All of them ready for the big Cal, Tennessee game.
The men were thicker than me. Most of them a few inches taller than me, and I’m just shy of six foot. They were clean-shaved and younger than me. Much younger, most of them. But somehow they looked a little older than me. The women were suspiciously tan for Northern Californian and Tennessean peeps. Steely eyed.
They really wanted Cal to win, these people. Or Tennessee. When one group in yellow started singing some sort of enthusiastic song, the other group in yellow began to boo. Nobody got punched and I was excited about that.
It’s not that I don’t like sports. If you know me, you know I love my Golden State Warriors. But this was a different sort of sport-oriented good-times. Something a bit more profound. More than anything, it reminded me of a Grateful Dead show I went to back in the early ’90s. It had that same feeling of a landless nation that periodically swarmed together, only to break apart, only to swarm back together.
I enjoyed the novelty of it all, and they appeared to tolerate my lack of school colors. I wished I had a phrase dictionary, so I could talk with them in their own language. “What time is the game?” I would have asked. “I hope the team you are rooting for is successful!”

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