People are angry. You see it every day on the internet and in the grocery store and most especially on the cluttered highways and byways of our proud country, where scowling faces hurtle white-knuckled down the road, an aggrieved fist just a heartbeat away from sounding out a blaring horn of disgust. It’s sad.
Where, we ask, can we get away from the madness? It turns out that for a few hours recently there was an escape. Hundreds gathered for a respite from the tensions of an angry world at the Palm Valley History Festival. Set in the most unlikely of places, the bucolic environs of a World War II surplus barracks on Canal Boulevard deep inside old Palm Valley.
Love and smiling faces greeted those lucky enough to attend and for a few hours the frenetic pace of the outside world was forgotten. The casual attendee can be forgiven if they felt somehow they had wandered back in time to a gentler era with musicians playing in the open air and storytellers spinning their reminiscences. Nostalgia was palpable and moonshine abounded as old and new gathered to honor the 75th Anniversary of the Palm Valley Community Association.
It is the kind of quirky good fun we have come to expect from a Standfast Asset Management event, and we were once again reminded that is agreeable to be a geek, even if only for a few hours. No doubt, Ernie Mickler and the others who came before us smiled happily from eternity.
The event was such a smashing success that one can only hope it will be repeated and each of us will be lucky enough to attend.
