“SHOW ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE.”

The woman with the bullhorn looks expectantly at the crowd. We are wilted, red-faced and smiling in solidarity — while the asphalt road is burning through our shoes. Ouch ouch ouch. 

“THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE,” we shout exuberantly.

The woman wipes sweat off her forehead and repeats the call and response.

And we march on down the road protesting the rule of kings — while dancing from foot to foot against the oppression of sweltering heat.

“SQUEAL!” “SCREAM!” “SCREECH!”

The happy shrieks of children are heard way before the pool comes into view. 

“Hurry up, Grandpa!”

My granddaughter sits queenlike in an old stroller held together at crucial points by duck tape and good will. No one can ever accuse me of being handy. She is weighted down with towels and a swimming noodle and goggles and dolls. My son, her father, walks beside us.

My job is to push us to the pool, which is just fine. I am no swimmer. I sink to the bottom of a pool faster than an old piano. So pushing on dry land is the perfect “swim” job for me. 

We turn the corner into the pool area. Children are everywhere. The adults generally ignore the kids, hoping for a moment of quiet in their lawn chairs and at their picnic tables and laid out on towels. I wish them luck.

I enter the water a toe at a time. But not my granddaughter. She leaps high from the edge of the pool with pure abandon — KERSPLASH! 

“TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!”

The parade is a love fest. The marchers are hugging their friends on the side of the route and the friends are jumping into the parade and becoming the marchers. There is no such thing as a spectator during a Pride Parade.

And just like the Fourth of July parade in Urbandale, swag and candy fire the crowd up into a joyful frenzy. 

“Beads beads beads!” shouts the crowd moving into the street. And we are all rewarded with a handful of necklaces and a dancer’s smile and shimmy. And then we rush back to the curb before security gives us a scold.

But we don’t stay put for long. As the bright colors of the revolution continue marching past, we once again surge into the street shouting this time for candy, “here, here, hear.” And a shower of sweetness rains on us all.

“THROW IT TO ME, THROW IT TO ME, THROW IT TO ME!”

The shout crescendos across the water from a group of young boys.

These seal-slick kids bat a large beach ball over the top of the water, dunking and splashing their way to world domination — at least until it’s time for the popsicles their mom packed in the cooler.  

And over on the other side of the pool is the unmistakable:

“Marco!” 

“Polo!”

A game older than me. Is that even possible? And supposedly based on the notion that Marco Polo was lost most of the time on his grand adventures in China. Hah, one moment your friends with Kubla Khan and the next you are the loser in a swimming-pool game. 

Meanwhile, my six-year-old granddaughter is thrown high into the sky by my son with a squeal and a spin and a cry of pearly laughter.

I am motion sick on her behalf.

“FREE JEANETTE VIZGUERRA!”

The small crowd yells again, “Free Jeanette Vizguerra!”

The ICE detention center in Aurora CO is not an architectural monument. It is a flat block of a building with an exercise pen running along one side. Uninspired and sad seems to be its go-to theme. 

The protesters stand in their designated spots across the road as the minister from the First Unitarian Society speaks of Jeanette Vizguerra’s past sanctuary in their church, her 20 years of working and being a mother of U.S. citizens, and then her recent attempts to get her own citizenship. All to no avail.

“Free Jeanette,” the crowd chants.

Good luck with that — “She will remain in ICE custody pending removal from the United States,” an ICE spokesman told CBS News. 

Meanwhile, a single flower appears in the shiny and new chain link fence. 

“GRANDPA GRANDPA GRANDPA.”

My granddaughter somersaults from the edge of the pool and then dives to the bottom to retrieve a throw stick.

“Grandpa, grandpa, throw it farther,” she shouts loud enough that all grandpas in the metro area must be looking around for a stick to throw. 

I dutifully comply. 

A small boy floats past me in an inner tube. He has a sunhat, sun glasses, water wings and a grandma for a motor. He looks comatose. 

Is he my real grandchild? 

“Grandpa, grandpa, I’ll be the teacher and you be the student — do you want to do free style, back float, or breast stroke?” brightly shouts my granddaughter in her loudest outdoor voice.

I smile at my granddaughter . . .  and let myself sink below the water.

Slowly.

Quietly.

Serenely. 

While the sounds of summer drift past above. 

Joe