Moving

"Do you feel all right?"
"Yes, I feel all right!"

Jeff Giaquinto, leader of the amazing Brass Liberation band, called and we responded as we danced in the street yesterday. It was perhaps the most unusual Moving Sale ever held. We didn't know who would respond to our ads and emails that announced our move away from the East Oakland site we've occupied for two years. But we set up our Garage Sale Shop, were thankful for all the donations to sell, and hoped.

About 10 musicians dressed in black pants and bright red shirts stood in the street and on the curb out front, sending passionate music to listeners in upstairs windows and passing cars. An actual tuba. Trombones. Trumpets. Drums. Clarinets. Saxophone. Someone found an old, bent lavender umbrella decorated with streamers and pom poms, connecting us to New Orleans and the Katrina hurricane anniversary.

Neighbors and friends drifted in and out of the sale at Opera Piccola's headquarters on MacArthur Boulevard, finding great deals packed onto tables and boxes overflowing onto the floor with secondhand and new stuff. We sipped coffee, chatted, snacked and unearthed treasures from other people's lives. The sun shone on strangers getting to know each other. A woman held her baby on her porch behind the band. Another woman pulled her car up to the curb, ran across the street waving her handkerchief and joined the dance.

Our small, determined company is moving to a new and unknown location in order to share resources with another non profit. "I wish I'd found your place sooner," sighed one shopper, acknowledging how we can neighbors for months, even years, and not even meet. "We're still here, just not sure where," Corrina Marshall, our E.D. said.

We floated on the euphoria of throwing out doors wide and welcoming in the unexpected. This could be practice for the next phase of our existence in a changed world. Under the late summer sun, we practiced embracing uncertainty and it became a party.