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A friend has been taking lessons in African drumming for a number of years, and he invites me to an event where his group will be performing. Two different Ghanaian traditions are being celebrated: Twins Day (being a twin is considered good luck in Ghana), and Homowo, which is a sort of harvest festival. The main tent is set up on the baseball diamond of a high school, with smaller tents selling food and clothing in the outfield. It’s sparsely attended but the music is good, and it’s interesting to watch the rituals, even if I have no idea what they signify. At one point, a troupe with a huge colorful umbrella parades around the field, led by a man carrying a silver basin of water over his head. He stumbles and staggers back and forth as if intoxicated, as the others grab him and try to keep him from falling. Drums and bells pound and clank. Water sloshes everywhere. The line to the food tent is so long that by the time I get there, they’re out of everything except fried bananas, which taste pretty bland.

The same friend invites me to the annual Beaverton Night Market that evening. I meet him at a pod of food carts. He introduces me to his friends and I realize how long it’s been since I met anyone new. We scatter in different directions and reconvene at a picnic table to eat. Montage, a restaurant which has been closed for years, has opened a cart here, and I order some mac and cheese for nostalgia's sake. 

This is the biggest crowd I’ve been in the thick of in a long while, and it takes some getting used to. Maybe it's me, but I feel like people have forgotten how to walk in public; I am constantly having to step aside for people walking right at me as if I'm invisible. We walk around and look at the crafts and watch some of the dancers and musicians at the stages set up here and there. 

We check out the gallery inside the new performing arts center, where there is a show of work about the Japanese internment camps here in Oregon during WWII. The artist’s grandparents were imprisoned in one of the camps. Unfortunately, the art is riddled with cliches and seems content to skim the surface of the subject rather than delve into it. Like so much other work about trendy topics, it feels opportunistic, and threatens to trivialize a genuinely horrible chapter of American history, which I think is dangerous. Maybe I’m just cynical. But I really hate bad art.

Regardless, it's a gorgeous night, and the atmosphere is festive, with families and couples and many gorgeous women of all shapes and colors strolling about. Some of the Ghanaian men from earlier in the day are here as well, sweating and smiling as the sound of their drums bounces between the brand new buildings.