The Truth Will Out

Someone
must have slipped a dose of Sodium Pentathol into our Diet Coke as we
went through security because we feel overwhelmed by a desire to reveal
a secret so deeply held we didn’t realize it existed until we were getting
ready to come into the Fleet Center this final night of the Democratic
National Convention.

The secret is that the real reason we leapt at the chance to get our
hands on convention credentials was not our history as an irredeemable
political addict, nor the chance to rub elbows with the jet setters and
powers who rule our country, nor even the inevitable boost to our  stats
which the exposure provides.  It was the balloons.

It must have been 1960, the first time we saw them.  We would have
been 7 then, and our Dad was a big Kennedy guy, and a minor figure in
local politics, so we are sure the convention would have been on the
family tube that long-ago July. A bunch of boring grownups talking and
talking and talking, and finally one good-looking Daddy-type got everybody
to cheering and standing on chairs and throwing their hats in the air,
and then, suddenly….

Balloons!! Everywhere!  More balloons than we had ever seen or
even imagined in our lives to that point. Pouring out of the ceiling,
raining down on the people, who raised their arms as though welcoming
and summer rain after a hot humid afternoon. They kept coming, it seemed
they would never stop, until finally they were lying all around, completely
covering the floor, swallowing up kids caught on camera until only their
heads showed atop the sea of balloons, bobbing blond and brown on the
surface.

Somewhere in our seven-year-old mind we knew that someday we would BE
THERE when the balloons fell, and wade in them ourselves, someday, somehow. 

And now, hot damn, WE ARE THERE, and there are the balloons, wrapped
up in long tube-like nets in the roof of the Fleet Center. Millions of
them. And we will be there, finally. It was worth the wait.