Celebrate Davis

The promotional announcement in The Davis Enterprise sounded pretty good:

Then: About 5,000 people "celebrated Davis" last spring at a Chamber of Commerce bash designed to promote local shopping and reintroduce residents to Davis businesses and services.

Now: The Chamber hopes to draw that kind of crowd again this year to the second annual Celebrate Davis!, Thursday, May 26, from 4:30 to 9 p.m. at Community Park, 14th and F streets. The festival-like event will feature 170 booths, including about a dozen restaurants offering everything from pizza to ......

but there were also warnings, too, for the dogs:

Fireworks will cap the second annual Celebrate Davis! extravaganza, on Thursday, May 26, in Community Park. But for pets, fireworks can be a frightening.

Some animals aren't bothered by the sights and sounds of fireworks. But others are terrified, becoming nervous, upset and stressed, animal experts say.

Animals have a keener sense of hearing than humans, and the unexpected explosion of fireworks can cause panic in dogs, cats, horses and even birds.

Warnings aside, there were plenty of dogs on-hand yesterday, at Celebrate Davis. DMTC had a booth there, and I went to help sell cookies. The place was pretty crowded and there were some interesting groups there, model airplane flyers chief among them, plus realtors, masseuses, churches, bicycle supply shops, and a wide variety of civic groups, but there were surprisingly few people there selling jewelry - this wasn't the Whole Earth fair!

I went to the Afghan food booth, not only because the food looked excellent (called something like 'sheeshli' - chicken with vegetables, with bread and basmati rice), but also because they were fairly disorganized and thus had the shortest line. Fine food! Poked around, bought a necklace, plus some sherbet as well.

At the DMTC booth, it was deer-in-the-headlights time. Who knew that the entire population of Davis, for months, had been nursing a ravenous appetite for cookies that could no longer be contained? We had to parry a virtual stampede, which ended only when the artillery opened up overhead.

The fireworks were very loud and impressive. I was reminded that folks who collect particulate samples from the air, and analyze them for chemical content, can spot the distinctive chemistry of fireworks smoke, which, last night anyway, was heading east, together with a variety of errant helium balloons and deafened birds, towards Sacramento.

Breaking down the fair was interesting too: carrying boxes under the blinding tennis-court lights, while dodging giggling little girls rolling down the small grassy hills in the park. Made me nostalgic - reminded me of a similar festive evening on Larimer Street in downtown Denver, with kites and purses being sold from festive shops and booths, in the long-past summer of 1976.

A fun time was had by all - summer is at hand!