"June is busting out all over, all over the fields and the hills...

(That was a line from a song I heard on Captain Kangaroo when I was a young'un.)

The past weekend had its fill of music and dance. On Saturday night, my son Paul and I headed up to a farm outside of Newark DE, for a terrific barn dance hosted by our buddy Tom. Tom lives in the apartment within the barn, most of which is converted to a dance hall. He and his brother, Charles, who owns the property, both collect vintage automobiles. Below the dance floor was sitting the shell of a 1928 Hupmobile. (My great-grandfather Albert Alexandre drove a 1927 Hupmobile at one point. During Prohibition, his wife made gin in the bathtub of the farmhouse, and had Albert and the boys -- including grandfather Leonard -- on the payroll. Great-grandpaw had to drive his car with the lights off to avoid the "revenuers." Sometimes he would hit a log left out on the road. Such obstructions had little effect on the Hupmobile; they must have been built like a tank.)

Anyway, I was dancing all day long, under balmy breezes and partly cloudy skies, at the annual Louisiana Swamp Romp at Wolf Trap. I made a new friend there, a young woman whose mother, amazingly enough, grew up on a farm near Fayetteville (Brown County) OH, as did my own mother. I took her to the VIP party afterwards. (I mean, we were practically related, right?) After making the usual rounds, we went some distance away and laid out a blanket in the woods. There, with the music playing in the background, we talked of one day getting back into camping and hiking, something this old Eagle Scout had been longing to do for awhile now. Together we gazed up through the trees at the night sky, and made a wish on the first star that appeared, amidst of a clearing of leaves. (Nothing else happened. Honest.)

But the call of the wild has been on my mind much of late. To have one's life and possessions self-contained within the confines of whatever one can carry, is to know how to live simply, and to know, if only for a brief interlude, that with which one can live without. There is a legend in the Celtic tradition, concerning the explorer-monk Brendan the Navigator. After a long voyage, he and his fellow monks found themselves on a deserted island. It was said that they encountered a flock of birds that sang psalms of praise to God during the appointed hours of morning and evening prayer:

"Beating their wings against their sides... they continued singing... for a whole hour. To the man of God and his companions the rhthym of the melody combined with the sound of their beating wings seemed as sweet and moving as a plaintive song of lament... day and night (they) praised the Lord." (from "The Voyage of Saint Brendan" in The Age of Bede, translated by J F Webb, edited by D H Farmer, Penguin Books, 1998.)

With summer "officially" here, I'm looking forward to my plans for the season. They include a dance camp in West Virginia later this month, and another trip to Seattle in August, this time with my son. Other highlights include my thirty-year (!!!) high school reunion. Stay tuned on that one...