(Note To Possible Readers:  I wrote the following blog last week.  I found it was too long to publish as a blog.  So, all last week, I tried to shorten it.  And couldn’t.  So I just tried to get it out of my mind, and couldn’t do that, either.  After publishing the video of the eagleowl yesterday it, somehow, became imperative that I actually go ahead and just put it on-line anyway.  But it is very, very long.  And, for this reason and others, I suggest, if you do not have much time, that you don’t start reading it now, as I don’t think you will be able to finish it and will become troubled by that.  But don’t worry, there will be another short blog, or a another video, tomorrow or the day after that or maybe next week.  In other words: this is something I have to get through now, not you.  MK)

I always wait for it.  I always wait for it all year long.  In fact, waiting for a weekend like this is what makes the Summer seem so long, makes the Summer seem to extend its actual length like a torture.

In The Morning:    From the front window above our small side-street whose sidewalks have never been used I look up now, above the buildings immediately opposite, above yet the high rise construction on the next block, to see a low gray sky, with even lower blotches of thin inky sketchy black clouds their edges frayed and stringy, rushing beneath it.  Although the window is closed I can feel the cold outside, can sense the moisture in the rushing air, and know hard rain is coming soon.  And then, as the wind picks up, large fragments of the sky turn slowly to steel and then light blue, intermittent allusions of watery sunlight seeping through to flit for a moment or two on leaves moving in the trees across the street or dancing lightly quickly over the chrome trimmings of the parked cars below, glimmers that quickly dissolve almost as suddenly as they appear.  It’s then I know the weekend I have been waiting for has come.

Even Better:    There’s a mission.  No, that’s too grand a word.  It’s an errand, actually.  But it will serve.  Our best friends are also our godchildren.  It’s their seventh wedding anniversary.  On the seventh anniversary copper or brass should be given.  And, my wife informs me, there is an Antique Fair in Harrestro Park.  It all adds up, like a many-stepped mathematical formula whose complexity derives from its simplicity.  But this time it is serendipity playing the part of simplicity.  More than this:  now into this year’s formula, a rationale and a purpose are added to perennial desire.  The moment now feels, to me, nothing less than rare and fleeting, and something more than sublime.

Outside:    It’s even colder than we expected, and my wife puts on her gloves against it as the wind picks up even further.  The inky scudding frail clouds have now grown into just as quick-moving but more substantial menacing dark shapes, and they move swiftly against a sky that has now turned beyond the palest blue to become almost invisible, with a low and terrific sun sending deeply slanted shafts of sunlight into our eyes and everywhere around us.  It is now a different degree of dramatic beauty.  And it makes me wish I could freeze time, freeze this frame of view, stop the motion of the earth.  But, then, I realize, it is this shifting, shifting, shifting, that makes this time so special – it is this sensation, not this season, that makes this moment what I was waiting for.  It’s the impermanence.  It’s the splintering and bright fragments, the fleeting, the current rushing past, the non-catchable.

At The Park:    Not being able to park near the Fair seems pre-ordained and necessitates a walk through the broadest length of the Park.  Before we get out of the car we watch the wind pick up a discarded newspaper page and make it dance in a circle and rise into the air itself for a moment before returning it to earth and then moving it along the sidewalk.  It is impossible – Impossible! – to not become affected by and attached to poignant scraps of ordinary drama that float and dance through life and then go away or are left behind like that discarded piece of newspaper.

We walk through the park as if strutting on a stage being lit by a capricious director;  the ominous clouds are fighting for dominance with the now bright sky above them as we tread a path in brilliant sunlight slanting through the trees or veer down another pushed by the finger chilling wind and under the cover of a gathering ominous darkness.

At one point in our journey the sun had just won a brief dramatic victory and we stopped as we noticed, on our left, more than a hundred small birdhouses gathered closely together like a fishing village and startlingly, incongruously, arranged on the ground beneath a spreading Chestnut tree.  As we got closer we saw they were all similarly red-washed almost as if bleached, and we could see that these birdhouses had never had a bird or anything else live in them.  Closer still we noticed a sign that had a picture of a woman on it.  She was the artist.  It was an installation.  And we both laughed out loud at the instant realization that we had suddenly had our identities changed and had now become an audience.  Wisely, my wife approached the installation closer to take a picture, while I retreated to a corner where two paths crossed and where some small round Autumn flowers had thoughtfully been planted.  As I looked down upon them in the dazzling sunshine the clouds again gathered above and the flowers seemed to now glow as it got darker and, again, I distinctly felt the sensation of precious things slipping through fingers.

At The Fair:    Before we left the Park it became obvious that while the sun had won a battle or two it was the darkness that had now won the war finally.  It was much colder as we left the Park and walked onto the concrete of the parking lot where the Antique Fair was being held.  The wind was now cutting at the edges of our eyes and stinging our ears.  My wife fished around behind her head and raised a hood from her collar and, thus armed, began her search for either copper or brass.  I, on the other hand, slouched this way and that way among the debris of heavy furniture, preposterous urns, gaudy vases, and other relics hopefully retrieved from musty basements and dusty attics.  It always depresses me to be around such once-grand things because I believe their grandness must have given them personalities.  And these personalities must want to be useful again, to live again, to be vital.  But my mood was suddenly lifted when I saw them.  Two ancient swords laying unattended on an elaborate credenza.  They were magnificent.  They were superbly filigreed.  They contained history.  And they magically delivered me directly back to a time of sticks and pieces of wood or carefully selected tree branches or anything else we could get our hands on to have swordfights and otherwise behave like Robin Hood.  I picked one up.  It was heavier than I thought it should be for fighting properly.  And the curved guard on the grip was not large enough to allow my hand full purchase.  But the other one, oh, it fit alright, and seemed to be just the right weight to vanquish the Sherriff of Nottingham or any of his henchmen.  Checking to make sure my wife was on the other side of the Fair, I lifted the beautiful sword from its counter, and shifted my stance sideward to decrease the opportunities of my opponent.  It occurred to me that I would have better balance if I arched my left arm behind me above my head.  Not extravagantly, but in the casual style of Errol Flynn.  It was in this pose that I felt it on my back.  It was a gaze, and turning I found that it came from two old women in scarves sitting on an antique couch each staring at me without expression.  But it was enough to instantly transform me from a swashbuckling eight year-old gallantly defending Maid Marion into a more than ridiculous, and possibly deranged, senior citizen awkwardly tilting at long gone windmills.

Rushing to catch up with my wife on the far side of the Fair, I was drawn to a line of a curved brass piece I saw in the distance.  Although it was overcast, it was shining amid its dull surroundings and as I got closer could make out the distinctive “O” shape in the middle of a hunting horn.  Closer still, I saw the pneumatic bulb on its end – it was not a hunting horn but, instead, was the type that could have been used on those majestic cars of the 1920s.  I yelled to my wife, but she couldn’t hear me.  So I squeezed the horn’s great rubber ball, which got the attention of everyone at the Fair.  Of course, she didn’t think it an appropriate anniversary gift.  Of course, I felt “appropriate” had nothing to do with it – it was a great, fine piece of history, and we should give it to our godchildren on their anniversary.  (Besides, that is was brass was a “plus”)  As we jousted back and forth fine pellets of ice began assaulting us, and soon turned to actual hail, ending the discussion.  Paying for the horn, the hail became serious, we didn’t know if it would get even worse, and ran quickly back into the Park for safety.  Standing beneath the shelter of a tall thick tree, we could see the hail strafing down through leaves, we saw people, pulling their coats over their heads, running through other parts of the Park, we heard their shrieks of mock, comic horror, imagined, and then speculated out loud about the sanctuaries they were rushing toward.  I raised my arm and I saw it was only eighteen minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon.

Now, this is the longest blog I have ever written.  And I have taken the time – and I have taken your time, if you are still with me – because I very much want to tell you two things that I have learned from last weekend that I feel are so important that I want to share them with you now.  The first thing is this:  When something is beautiful it cannot be minor, no matter how fleeting, no matter how transitory.  The second thing is this:  When something is beautiful – and you see it – it can never be lost.  Ever.