ask for the stories, lest they go untold

I was going to tell you about the magic that is my little Vermont town as manifested this evening in the monthly "Gallery Walk" which highlights the amazing wealth and diversity of art and artists and general community-ness around here.

I was going to tell you about it being my first Gallery Walk since I moved here six months ago, how I've been meaning to go every month but something has always come up, until I finally made it out on this beautiful, freakishly warm evening and walked all over downtown with my friend Wendy and we fought the incredible masses of people - really, it was like everyone in town was out tonight - who were out and about enjoying downtown and the evening and the clowns in the square and the battle of the teenage bands in the River Garden (really).

And how we stopped into the antique store for a while to watch the "fashion show" being hosted by Alfred, our local flamboyant transvestite (though it's somewhat more noteworthy in these parts that he's Black than that he's a transvestite), and then spent a while in one of the local brewpubs running into a thousand people we (well, Wendy) knew and watching the beginning of the Sox game, and then wandered down the street to watch Wendy's boyfriend play the spoons in accompaniment to an excellent (and, might I add, very cute) banjo player and a guy on a washtub bass. (Update: and the guy who came over and - I kid you not - breakdanced in front of them for a few minutes, ending with a scary/awesome backflip.) This is a town where people regularly busk on the sidewalks, and during Gallery Walk you can't go 20 feet without seeing another musician. And where drivers tend to wave apologetically as they slowly make their way through the people spilling off the sidewalk around the musicians, as if to say "oh silly me, driving my car here in the street where you wanted to be standing, sorry about that."

But then I made my way back out here to the woods, where I'm retreating (read: housesitting) for the next week, and I went out to shut the chicken coop door and looked up into a thousand stars and listened to the brook running alongside the house and saw a couple of meteors, because this place is just regularly magical. And I came back in and checked my email, where my mom had responded to my recent email about my new attraction to fiddling with the memory that "Grandpa (my Dad) use to come out on our screened in front porch when I was a kid and it was time for the neighborhood kids to stop playing hide and seek, and he would "fiddle" for us so that the other parents, hearing the music, would let us stay out a little after dark. He'd play things like variations of Pop goes the Weasel and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

And suddenly the many excitements of this evening faded a little, and the real highlight of my day became that story, and seeing in my mind's eye my mother as a little kid running around her neighborhood in Memphis, TN just like my brother and I used to do in Normal, IL on warm evenings a lot like this evening. And remembering my grandpa, whose life overlapped with mine only just long enough that I vaguely remember him, but whose violin-playing is, along with his reading me Berenstein Bears books, what I remember best.

And knowing that I could pick up my violin tonight (which is not his violin - that's in my brother's possession - but is actually my grandmother's from the other side of the family) and go sit on the porch and play to the twinkling stars. This "neighborhood" has more chickens and raccoons and deer than children playing hide and seek, and I already gave myself permission to stay out after dark, but I'll play for the beautiful evening and for the pause between running-around and safe-in-bed. I'll play to remember that this music is about something greater than myself. Because I remember enough about my grandpa to believe that would make him really happy.

Thanks, Mom.