Tulip Festival again!

In case you're wondering (and just down the road hundreds are--and praying too), right now, this morning, the sky is gray, not threatening-gray, just gray. While Orange City would greatly prefer something cloudless, they know well-and-good not to expect it. Some years are blessed, some are near-disasters.

It's Tulip Festival time again, and even to me these days, that title takes on the upper case. For decades we lived twenty minutes away in Sioux Center, where business acumen long ago learned to turn a dollar. Compared to Orange City (and most residents do) Sioux Center has the bucks, if for no other reason than they have the Wal-Mart. All things being otherwise being equal, Wal-Mart long ago established Sioux Center as the financial hub of Sioux County capitalism. Last week's guest, by the by, was Ron De Sanctimonious (as the Orange Man calls him) who visited Pizza Ranch. For a moment or so, he is reported to have looked in the direction of Orange City, but even the pose was political. 

Orange City spends its energy and spirit of its citizenry, Dutch or not, on its Tulip Festival. If the sky clears there'll be thousands of visitors this year, just like last--tens of thousands.  

The weather? Lookin' pretty good, really. So happy you asked.

Maybe a thundershower out of the blocks, Friday maybe grab a sweatshirt, but Saturday, the biggie, just about perfect, almost exactly what the Chamber of Commerce ordered up. Ought to be good. Ought to be fun. 

I spent most of life in Sioux Center being downright haughty, nose in the air, about OC's Tulip Festival--a bunch of grown men and women square skipping in wooden shoes down Main Street, as if our grands' grands ever even thought of such things silliness. Dancing was verboten until the 1950s, for pity sake. All that TF goofiness for what?--for money. Talk about selling your birthright!

Having moved much closer to the festival, I've been born again when it comes to tulips. What OC wants to foster for itself is a personality drawn from any of hundreds of old world villages. It's far less concerned with making money and pouring concrete (not that it doesn't). The vision of the community's movers-and-shakers is to be something akin to a European village, a place where you can sit in the park and maybe have a glass of wine with friends (well, maybe not wine). Sioux Center has a state highway through the heart of town--it's good business. Orange City's heart is a park overflowing with heavenly manicured tulips. (Some just a bit over the hill, but there's no end to the color!)

I've seen, even become part of, the herculean effort required to bring in tens of thousands of people, then host them--keep their hunger abated, their senses raptured, and, more than anything, keep them smiling, as if Orange City is, well, a dandy, happy place, even if none of them ever hanker to wear wooden shoes. Orange City has civic pride Sioux Center would die for, and the Festival generates it in abundance. To channel Hillary, it takes a village--hundreds of volunteers--to do the Festival.

Still, the whole thing is mostly silly. What long ago made towns like Orange City and Sioux Center hum and tick and prosper was rich, rich land drawn and quartered by incredibly hard-working people with an ethic that grew out of something very few of them could identify anymore, but still operates--something I'd shamelessly call Dutch Calvinism. 

That theological heart is something mostly bypassed amid the tulips and the street scrubbing--mostly bypassed and mostly forgotten. At worst, Tulip Festival tinkers around with the trivial. But what I've also seen is that the tulips create a mind that deliberately does what it can to evoke the past in a manner that keeps the past alive--and that's noble. 

So, yup, I'm going. Even though most of my Sioux County past was in Sioux Center and I live in Alton, I'll be in OC. If you'd like to tell me I'm wrong, I'll be on duty at the museum, a place named--guess what?--The Dutch American Heritage Museum. We call it the DAHM.

Have a great time. Remember, Friday, you may need a sweatshirt.