Celebrate Davis

"Celebrate Davis" was first held in 2006.  Someone in the Chamber of Commerce had the bright idea to hold a free community-wide festival that would be part picnic, part music festival, and part business expo.  It's a great idea.  Community businesses and various organizations set up booths in the community park and people come to stroll through the booths, pick up free gifts, buy dinner and at 9 p.m. watch fireworks.  It's great for everyone, young, old, and four-footed.

The thing has grown over the years and new innovations are added each year.  They now have valet parking for bikes in the dog park, closed to dogs for this event.  This is an event you really want to either walk to or bike to because you sure aren't going to be able to find parking with half the town trying to attend.

This year the University Retirement Community, or URC (a senior citizen housing development), decided to give rides from the parking lot to the booths, which was very much appreciated by old farts (like me).  They used a decorated golf cart and drove us past the tennis courts and swimming pool and picnic area to the heart of the action and then gave us little packets that held cloths for cleaning our glasses as a souvenir.

You want to stop first at one of the booths whose free gift is a sack of some sort, so that you have someplace to out all of the stuff you pick up.  Woodland Hospital was giving away bright orange bags that could be worn as a backpack, and the URC was giving away cold bottles of water.  With water in hand and an empty sack, I was ready to hit the booths.

The booths included a cross section of businesses and charities.   Lots of insurance companies, banks, money-lenders, and auto dealers.

But there were also booths for Davis High School, The Davis Enterprise, sport teams, a food collection group, and, of course, the Davis Community Network, for which I recorded a little spot telling people what was good about the group.

There were a wide variety of free gifts being handed out, everything from buttons to little toys, to candy, to water, to back scratchers (I don't know who was giving those away, but I saw someone carrying one...I wanted one!)

For the kids there was a petting zoo with funny looking llamas, ducks, chickens, bunnies and squealing piglets

There were pony rides and a couple of bouncy houses, and a rock climbing wall and, for the more adventurous, you could step inside a giant hamster ball and race someone in another hamster ball.

We finally got to the food booths and Walt chose the Buckhorn Steak House roast beef sandwich, so I went to find a table for us.  I sat with Steve and Jan Isaacson, of the Davis Musical Theater Company, who gave me the low-down on their upcoming (exciting) season, and one of the DMTC members and her son (eagerly devouring a cup of ice cream).  They were the first people we knew that we had encountered the whole time we were there.  We remarked about how if this had been 20 years ago, we would have come across lots of other people we knew.  While we were there, we ran into a woman we knew back in the 1980s when our kids were in school together (and whom I would not have recognized at all, if Walt hadn't been with me), we saw the DCN people, a woman from Citizens Who Care, who, along with Walt was passing out flyers for their upcoming beer fest.  And of course, we ran into Bob Bowen, Paul's old boss, who runs events like this.

When we first met Bob, he was a young man, barely out of college, who was the Peter Pan of Davis, visible at every town event, usually dressed in a costume.   Now his age is starting to show, and his son (who was 5 when Paul, his buddy, died 12 years ago) was dressed as a frog and helping to run the dunking booth.

But we really didn't see any other people we knew.  I noticed with some pleasure that events like this are no longer lily white, as they would have been when we first moved here in 1973, when any person of color would have stood out like a sore thumb.  Now there are lots of people of all sorts of color, and a good representation of women in middle eastern garb.  Davis has moved into the 21st century.

Eventually, I hopped the golf cart for a ride back to the parking lot.  Walt tried to take my picture, but hasn't quite mastered the "quick snapshot" on his new cell phone camera yet.

Before walking home, we stopped at the two trees planted by the Veterans Memorial Theater, one dedicated to Paul and one to David, both now starting to look a little weather worn.

I didn't bring much home in my sack -- the glasses cleaning cloth, a book about trips to Europe, another sack, and this great personal fan, another gift of the URC, which shows a message about the community as its blades turn.

All in all, a good time was had by all, even the dogs.