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By Jeff Barton
Note: This first appeared in the Free Press, December, 2004.
A gap opened between bookends of an unusually cold and cloudy winter this past weekend. Into the warm sunshine stepped Budafest, jaunty, 25-years old, and two-faced, like one of those Eastern gods: looking forward and back at the same time.
Budafest has always been a spectacle of small-town riches, of both holy impulse and commerce. Delayed by thunderstorms earlier in the month, Buda's fest this year fell either in the Christmas vacation or the winter break, depending on your level of touchiness.
It was glorious all the same.
Budafest is not what it was when a rag-a-tag band of merry artisans and non-conformists, musicians and hippies and merchants and boosters invented it. Like most celebrations there was an ulterior motive: the need to put food on the table in a lean town in lean times.
Like a few celebrations, it has outgrown itself, cast off its tattered robes and mounted the alter of sacred tradition.
It's on the radio, for Pete's sake. And the teevee. The throngs come from miles around.
In fact, the miles around are full of throngs. People crowd the prairie now, and the hills, and the watered woods in between.
Oh, there's room for more. And more will come. So Budafest at its anniversary was a two-headed celebrant, looking forward and back.
There are no more powder puff football games on the green, with practically the whole town on the field, no more Homecoming Queens drawn from Buda Grocery's time-out-of-mind family ownership; no more fire pits on Main after a hard day at Budafest where all the organizers and most of the vendors gather for hot sustenance and liquid courage.
Buda is a boomtown these days, a Top 40s brand instead of alternative folk and original country swing.
And yet: there are wiener dog legends, and whole families on bales of hay in the winter's crisp air watching school choirs and befuddled girl dancers, listening to sweet, professional music - and Christmas carols organized by a gifted Jew. There are churches, schools and coffee shops where kin are made instead of born.
The times they are a-changin', yes - Buda and Budafest with them. But new people with breathtaking talents are everywhere. If some new folk erroneously presume that local fairs must surely be organized by paid staff or run for profit, if a few are reluctant about giving, well, there are also more volunteers in the charity booths than ever.
With the crowds come not only new talents, but also economic and social opportunity.
Budafest is at its essence an end-of-the-year event that is forward looking, a defiant shout in the direction of spring from the heart of winter. It is bittersweet, too, for its annual passage brings to mind what is lost, including certain faces who would have smiled at these changes and these new throngs: smiles of knowing and bemusement, of kindness and consternation.
For those who knew where and how to look this weekend, though, some of those ghostly smiling faces could still be found, under one of the big shade trees, just at dusk, with the earth still warm from the day's sun but the air chilling nicely. The smiles were there, perhaps unnoticed by many, but there just the same: Jimmie Porter in her folding chair, Alma Rose and Thelma Chambers giggling, one leaning on a cane, Neal Franklin with a Santa hat on his head and a mint julip in one hand, Bojo scheming away about next year, Marietta Fly serving tuna sandwiches, Earle Younts warming up an old blue pickup to carry everyone home. And in the background, middle aged hippie dreamers patting one another on the back, marveling at the embrace by suburbia, saying to one another: look what we done.
An almost-old-timer stops to ask these apparitions for a comment on current events, maybe a word on how many souls have been lost since the time off from school became known as "winter break." He asks, but these are kindly faces in the shadows, so their chuckles are gentle. They only smile, and shake their heads, and look out toward the new year, when Christmas vacation will be over and the Free Press will return from its own holiday looking forward to another round of life's celebration.
Goodnight, Bojo, wherever you are.
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