Heritage Festival - Reprise

Yesterday afternoon, after Tori got off the phone with her boyfriend. I asked her what her plans for the weekend were. She told me that she and her boyfriend were driving to Iowa today, but Friday evening she was planning to go to the Lincoln Highway Heritage Festival in our little downtown and "I thought maybe you'd go with me, because friendship."

I was still working, but I packed it up and went to the Heritage Festival.

Tori and her friend Megan at our first Heritage Festival

I believe we attended our first Heritage Festival in 2002.

It's a small town festival with about ten carnival rides, a lot of greasy food, three days of mediocre music, a car show, a sad little "beer garden" in the middle of the street and a Sunday morning parade.

We never miss it.

That first year, she and Megan thought they were wandering off and exploring,but our eyes were always on them and they never got more than 15 or 20 feet away.

Next year, they'll let her into the beer garden (if she wants to sit on plastic chairs in the middle of the street and drink cheap beer out of plastic cups).

Tori, Megan and Heather at the Heritage Festival in 2015.

Last year, when she wandered off with Megan and another friend (I didn't feel like I had to surreptitiously keep an eye on them this time), I may have wandered off to...um...sit in plastic chairs in the middle of the street and drink cheap beer with my lifelong friend, Todd.

It may have been kind of a lot of beer, though we also rode some rides and reconnected with Tori for a late dinner downtown as the festival was wrapping up.

Times change. Thus far, we've been fortunate enough to go mostly from one good time to another.

Okay, maybe things don't really change all that much from year to year...

Early this morning, she set off on the five hour drive to the Iowa State Fair with her boyfriend and I headed into town to wander the antique car show she was a little relieved to miss.

Now she's eating bad food on a different curb in a different state
with a different person. Is that what "all grown up" means?

One day soon, she'll be in New York or Seattle when the Heritage Festival rolls around, or busy with her friends or boyfriend that weekend, or just wondering what she ever saw in that dirty little street festival. Maybe I'll go to the Heritage Festival alone, the way I did in 2013 when she was out of town, or maybe I'll take her children. Maybe I'll be the one to have moved, finally finding my way to the ocean shore I've longed for all my life.

Maybe I'll have a moment of wistfulness, if I'm on the other side of the country. Maybe I'll take a picture from the top of the Ferris wheel and text it to her. Maybe for just a moment, she'll wish that she was eating bad food in a parking lot or waiting in line for the umbrella ride instead of whatever grown-up, glamorous, important thing she might be doing.

But maybe--I hope--we'll both smile, and someone will exclaim "I'm Superman!" and laugh or wonder aloud what might have happened to the carny we called Slash.