Alberta Culture Days came and went, and I spent all of my time chasing after one lead or another.
It was cold and windy and I would much rather have enjoyed a warm cup of tea with some poetry any day of the week.
Instead, while the majority of you were in the big city or wherever it was you were, I was here, braving the drizzle as I marched from the library to the museum and back again in an almost continuous circuit, trying to fill holes in the paper with photo ops.
Alas, it was an exercise in futility.
When I went to the library, there was no one there.
When I went to the museum, no one was there either.
Back and forth, for three days, looking for a face, any face at all.
As luck would have it, I was always doing something else when there were people present – on Saturday, I was at BCHS covering a volleyball tournament.
Sunday, there was a fire.
Covering emergency events like that are hard because you almost never hear locations on the scanner, not clearly anyway, and if you don’t jump in your car immediately after spotting that first fire truck or ambulance, they are most certainly going to lose you quickly once you are outside of the town’s limits.
If it hadn’t been located on the Leader’s metaphorical doorstep, chances are good I never would have found it.
Obviously I feel bad for the people who were affected by the fire.
I’m not a monster.
I just had higher expectations for the weekend.
There wasn’t even a Taste of Barrhead this year.
According to Elaine Dickie, this was due to the fact that the elementary school gym scheduled to host it also had a volleyball tournament reserved for that day – the very same games I covered at the high school.
I was really looking forward to it too, mostly because where I’m from, street festivals and the like are pretty commonplace and I wanted to get to know the culture of the town I had so recently adopted as home.
It wasn’t all bad however, I really enjoyed the Magic Lamp Singers whom I saw at the Culture Days kick-off in the library on Friday.
While they are not quite in my top-ten, the Singers performed cantata – a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, in this case, a piano played by member Andrea Beren, and entertained me for a while before duty called me elsewhere.
There is a wealth of talent in Barrhead.
You just have to know what you’re looking for.
From the artisans of the gallery to the anonymous pianist who tinkers at the gazebo, this town sure has its surprises.
Maybe next year, rather than heading out to the bigger cities, maybe our community can get together instead and show this reporter what it means to be from B-Town.
