Renaissance By Laura J. Oliver

The last time I was at the Renaissance Festival accompanied by children, my son was a 5- year-old-towhead sporting an America’s Cup t-shirt, and my oldest daughter was a lanky 8-year-old. My youngest daughter was an idea I hadn’t had yet. Where was she, I wonder? Where was the third best idea I ever had? Not here in the land of the past but waiting to be called from the land of tomorrow.

Andrew wanted a sword, of course, and Audra a wreath of dried flowers. I bought a wreath for mother and daughter, and we both wore them in our hair. But today, I’ve come with my son’s son and daughter—and we stroll through acres of woods admiring the revelers’ costumes, the multitude of vendors, and the variety of food selections.

I’m referred to as M ’lady by a boy who wants to read my palm, but I’m not the royalty here. These woods are host to those whose ancestors risked everything to escape kings, queens, and lives of servitude.

The kids and I are looking for a magic shop, but as the notoriously poor map reader I am, we will end up back in the parking lot or once more at the porta-potties, so we stop at a booth for directions. Unfortunately, as the lady unfolds the sketch of Revel Grove to direct us, my brain turns off. It’s like when I’m trying to pay with the currency of a foreign country. I stuff a fistful of bills in the general direction of the salesclerk, cab driver, or sketchy guy with the watches clipped inside his raincoat and let them take what is due. I trust people and am rarely wrong.

That I know of.

So, I try to memorize which way the helpful lady points since she lost me at “you are here.” Then I tell her how beautiful her eyes are which is what I was thinking about when I should have been listening to the directions.

My interpretation of if you see something, say something.

We are still in a state of anticipation, but it is hot, and a lot of this entertainment isn’t for kids. They’re not going to get tipsy from a mug of ale, and they can’t understand a word from the Shakespeare stage.

We can’t find the magic shop, sorry, sorry, but we do find a puzzle shop. These works of art are made of glass, each piece unique, cut with multiple sides that can fit together in more than one way. There is a book, and I mean a book, on how to make solving the puzzle increasingly challenging. The $68 price tag seems excessive, but the kids have asked for nothing yet, not even funnel cake fries, and it looks like an heirloom.

We front up at a table where you can try out a puzzle, and the woman selling them starts talking to me about the state of the world, the coming election, and the versatility of her puzzles, but she’s difficult to hear. The ale shops are outselling her, and the crowds milling behind me are jostling toward the joust.

But I hear enough to express some anxiety and hope about the coming change of regimes when the woman, intense pale blue eyes, says clearly, and apropos of nothing, “I’m from the future.”

I stare at her and repeat dumbly, “You’re from the future,” in case I didn’t hear her correctly.

“Yes,” she confirms. “Most people here are from the past, but I’m 500 years ahead of you.”

This revelation is so bizarre that I briefly consider whether it is true. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, according to Carl Sagan. Maybe the Starship Enterprise has come back to Earth and where better to disguise the crew than in costume at a Renaissance Festival!

But what is actually going on is that when I was little, I intuited the only sin is unkindness, and to shame anyone else is the greatest unkindness of all. So.

Gonna roll with the future here.

I smile and nod as if I’ve been enlightened. “You’re from the future,” I repeat.

And she replies, “And I know what is going to happen.”

“Do you now,” I say.

“What I know is this,” she continues. “The outcome doesn’t matter. It’s all going to be okay.”

I very much want to believe this is true. She looks at me with her strange pale eyes and says, “I promise.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe things are not falling apart but falling in place. Maybe the pieces can come together in multiple ways to make an even better design. So, we buy the puzzle and later a sword for the only son of my only son because that is the only thing he asks for.

My granddaughter, with long red hair to her waist and a love of perfection, wants only a wand—a star on a stick trailing ribbons like a comet’s tail— to wave over this whole bright and broken world.

We are making our way through the grove to the field where the cars are parked. If the kids weren’t with me, I’d find that street urchin and get my palm read, hoping to learn that the light above my head is very bright or that peace is imminent. But that is for another time.

The world is the puzzle we carry from the grove, fractured pieces that can fit together in new and different shapes. It brings to mind an image from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—a Victorian poet-priest who, while lamenting all that man has done to this world, claims nature is never spent, and that love will call forth the best of all things.

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.