NOTHING'S QUITE AS GOOD FOR US AS A FEW HOT AIR BALLOONS

I don't know about you, but I'm one who hopes the folks responsible for having brought us last month's "Balloon Fest '93" will make plans to bring them back again next year, and the year after, and the year after. What a delightful, even thrilling sight it was to see those beautiful craft soaring over our community a couple of weekends ago. The following article was written by Thomas D. Murray. It is at once a charming and reamarkable message, both about balloons, and about our need for a shared sense of community.

MIDDLETOWN, OHIO Uplifting Sport: Gazing at Balloons With `Everyone'

Many times since last summer I have found myself telling friends who live elsewhere about the National Balloon Championship, which is being held here in our little town in southwestern Ohio again this week. Yet as I try to convey the excitement to them I sense by their expressions that I'm not getting across what the experience is really like.

I am saying words like `magnificent' and `beautiful' and `unbelievable,' yet I am an experienced enough advertising writer to know my words aren't working, that I haven't made my friends understand what those of us here feel as we stand in the midst of those beautiful windships, watch them ascend into the morning mists or the long shadows of early evening, imagining what it must be like up there with a God-like view of the countryside in one of its loveliest seasons and most spectacular times of day, with either a sunrise or sunset waiting to begin.

I wonder if my problem here is that much of our magic is really happening on the ground that the spirit-lifting phenomenon of the big balloons is grounded in the little balloons and the T-shirts and the Smith Park picnics. And in the people sitting together in their folding chairs on the hills overlooking the airport, in the strangers you meet on Tytus Avenue or in the parking lot at Towne Mall as a hissing sound aloft inspires you to exchange stories of your week under the balloons.

Many of us today tend to distrust the unity of America, to play down or discourage a belief in our common goals. That should come as no surprise when partisanship of every type and kind so dominates our news. Our communication satellites, TV and radio transmitters, printing presses seem to churn out such reports night and day from 10 times more reporters as we'll ever need; they seem to draw ever darker the dividing lines between us all, whether we're black or white, right-to-lifer or pro-choice, a believer in taxing the rich or the poor, in praying in school or taking Santa off the town hall.

Some people question seriously whether all these American parts and parcels could ever again rally as people did in 1941 in a marvelous and massive united effort that, starting almost from scratch, smashed the German and Japanese war machines in less than four years. And they remain unconvinced by our successes in the Gulf War, believing it was a tiny, tiny trial whipped up by the winds of of publicity to sound arduous.

My own feeling is that we are still of one piece here in America, that what we share as human beings, what we feel and see and touch and hope for in common are greater than our differences. And, in fairness, I should add that nothing reminds us of that more poignantly than those same TV sets and newspapers that dramatize our disagreements, as they also show us people like ourselves hip deep in the ruins of all they own in the Midwest flooding, but helping each other and talking about a better day that's got to be on the way.

Something else may have the same effect on us, and that's getting together once in a while with everybody not just our little coterie of friends or members of the club or parish. There is a special value in gathering, as our grandmothers and grandfathers did in the days before TV, in the park or on the village green or at the county fair.

Or where they're flying balloons. For as human beings, we are in many, many ways alike; nothing points that out more clearly than hearing, seeing, sharing the same experiences side by side with others. It is a good feeling, a reassuring feeling. And it may also be the reason I can't seem to express the magic of the balloons to my friends. I think maybe you have to be there.

reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

One wonders ... might it be possible to combine a balloonfest with the annual Riverfest? For that matter, perhaps, why not transform Riverfest into a blues and jazz festival that also features the balloons? Blues arose out of the Mississippi Delta; what could make more sense than for our Riverfest to capitalize on a natural musical tie-in to the River?

Charlie Knote has a great idea coming up with his barbeque cookoff planned for the weekend of August 21. What about a combined weekend of Blues, Barbeque and Balloons, all built around a rejiggered Riverfest? Might really put Cape on the map as a summer destination.