For most people, Williamson is a three-minute town. One you pass through on Route 104 when you’re trying to get somewhere exciting like Niagara Falls or Buffalo. Maybe where you stop and get gas, or buy a snack at the Rite Aid, or get lunch Orbakers or the Mason Jar.
For me, this three minute town is home.
For many others, however, it was home, past-tense. In high school, us seniors bragged about where we were going to go next. Some of us were off to save the world as a member of the armed forces. Others would challenge the college education system, and get the career of their dreams...or whatever one would guarantee them the most money.
Whatever the future held, it wasn’t in Williamson.
We all went our separate ways, connected only through Facebook messenger, Twitter updates, and risque Instagram pictures of frats and club scenes. Over time, the likes, retweets, and hearts from the friends we once played sports, did shows, studied, and slept over with slowly ebbed, replaced by coworkers, college classmates, and people you once got drunk with but don’t remember.
And then, Williamson’s Apple Blossom Festival would roll around. It’s your typical small town carnival, held strategically in the third week of May, just as we all returned from college. While some of the events vary from year to year, a typical Apple Blossom features a 5K, two parades (a Kiddie and a regular one), a carnival, a car show, and a grandstand for concerts. Apple Blossom may be the closest thing Williamson has to a true Homecoming...but that doesn’t mean it’s too exciting for your typical 18-24 year old college student...
As a kid, however, Apple Blossom time was like a holiday, akin to Christmas or Thanksgiving. Never will I forget the days the bus driver would yell at us for screeching at the top of our lungs when we’d drive by Breens Shop ‘n Save, where the carnival rides were parked. Or the infamous “Tilt a Whirl” speech our gym teacher would deliver, to keep us from banging our heads against our lockers, disrupting classes, and ripping water fountains out of the walls in excitement (and yes, the latter actually happened).
Of course, in our youthful ebullience, we ignored the many faults of our beloved hometown festival. Like an electric lamp, the festival does tend to attract the more...questionable residents of Williamson (if there were more than a hundred teeth present at this year’s event, you can color me shocked). The rides, vendors, and participants in the car show have been the same for almost 20 years. On top of that, downtown Williamson looks like a town from the Walking Dead. The faces of the blandly-colored buildings are freckled with wear and tear, while untrimmed grass and cigarette butts sprout from the cracks in the sidewalks.
High school came, and as we grew more cynical, we threw off the blinders our childhoods threw over our eyes,and we caught on to all of these faults. Catching Jolly Ranchers thrown by local firemen in the parade, consuming pounds of fried dough, and trashing your friends in bumper cars didn’t have the luster it once did. Our weekends were better spent inside playing video games, perusing social media, or (God forbid) preparing for our Regents exams, rather than puttering around outdoors with people we saw everyday anyway.
As underclassmen returning from our first years of college, Apple Blossom became a convenient excuse to see old friends again. But as we reached our junior and senior years however, bogged down by college capstones, theses, and internships, all memoirs from the Apple Blossom days faded into the dustbin of history, one that many of us were happy to discard.
Except me.
I’ve been out of college for two years and out of high school for four...and yet I still find myself in the Village of Williamson on the third Saturday in May, wandering back and forth under the sole streetlight in the middle of town between the two blocks, hoping I run into people I know. I still drag my friends on the Round-Up, watch the fireworks from our secret spot behind the district building, and pick numbers in the annual cow plop (Google image it, I dare you). It’s been this way for 8 years now, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
But why? Why do I come back to this stupid, congested, malodorous, trashy festival every year?
The answer is simple: I don’t have a choice.
I suppose I’m cursed with love; a love of tradition. Like I said before, Apple Blossom was like a national holiday in my younger years. To give it up would be like not putting up a pine tree in December, or eating turkey in November. I know all the floats and marching bands in the parade by memory, and can probably name all the rides and vendors too. It’s a curse of love and, perhaps, a little insanity too. Every year, I return expecting the Festival to do something different.
On the other hand, I’m blessed to have such a healthy network of friends still in the area. For every classmate or peer off completing a summer internship, there’s a friend keen on keeping the tradition alive while making new memories. This year, we stole an abandoned grocery cart that was lying in the middle of the street, and rode it down the steep hill behind the abandoned Gallo’s hardware store. We convinced a man in a gorilla costume from the parade to harass the people across the street. We made new friends with some of Williamson’s future graduates (and the future is certainly bright, there).
I like to think that we’re the ones that never grew up; that got away from the constricting tentacles of adulthood, that forces to forsake the very memories and happenstances that made us who we were. Even at a festival where things never change, that childish imagination effervesces within us.
You might not think that way. You don’t have time to be a kid anymore. You have ambitions you want to fulfill, a house in some upscale suburb you want to buy someday...and there’s nothing wrong with that. God knows I have my own ambitions, from getting published someday to returning to school at NYU and getting a Masters at the Gallatin School.
It’s true that life only moves forward, and that we need to adapt or perish in this dog-eat-dog world...but who’s to say we can’t stop and sit on the sidewalk for a parade? That we can’t stop for two minutes and enjoy a ride on the Round-Up? We’re taught to constantly produce, never consume. To never look back and always find a way to move forward. It’s hard for us to remember that a healthy amount of tradition can keep us sane when the ecology around us is constantly changing.
No matter where we end up in the world, the Festival will continue, in the physical and metaphysical sense. There’s an Apple Blossom Festival in all of us; it’s just a matter of whether we embrace it or not.
And next year, I hope I meet you there.
