THE GIRL AT THE FESTIVAL

Knox, the artist, sitting at the far end of the bar at The Last Mile Lounge (it’s his usual perch), drinking coffee for a change — bad coffee, he’d say — feels a breeze at this back. The side door has flung open. A breeze, a spring chill. More like a wind has blown it. Deano, the bartender, goes to close it.

“No,” says Knox. ” Leave it.” He’s turned on his stool, hands on his knees. “The sun is out. It’s spring. The wind won’t last. There’s no such thing as May wind. But here’s a May wind. Let’s just enjoy it…it probably the only wind out there. And it’s probably already blowing out to sea.”

Everybody thought about that.

“It’s the middle, too” he says. He meant the middle of the month. It was May fifteenth.

“It’s the middle of not just any month, but the month of May.” Knox turned on his stool to look at us all. “I’m thinking and seeing Spring. Flowers. Girls. I knew two girls born this day. May Fifteen. Exact beautiful middle of the month. Frank Sinatra died on this date,too. End of the last century. He sang a lot about spring, and girls”.

Someone — not many people at the Mile, middle of a Friday on a May afternoon — someone got up, a guy nobody knew, dug down deep for a quarter and played ole Sinatra on the juke box. Frank was soon singing something that made it feel like spring. I’ve heard so much Sinatra in my life, all those love songs run together. But it was good, just flowing out at us.

“Too bad he never cut a song called “Spring Wind” to go with “The Summer Wind, ” somebody said. It could go, “The spring wind, came blowing in…”

“Blowing in summer,” somebody said.

That was another guy, sitting by the door over his burger and beer. He was done eating, just sitting. I didn’t know him, either. That’s when I realized we were all guys that afternoon –and, except for Deano and Knox and me — all strangers.

“Wind like that, at this time of the year blows in memories,” some guy by the other side door said. From the way the new leaves on the few trees out on the street were fluttering in the muted sunlight outside that door, he must have been feeling the breeze, too.

“That’s my thought,” he said, sitting over a glass of red wine.

“Don’t we always wish it would stay May?” I said. I was glad at that moment I’d stopped into The Mile. It was a good time and place to be having thoughts like that.

“How old are those girls now?” Deano asked Knox about the girls he’d known whose birthday it was. “Are they still — alive?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “They’d be seventy-seven, I believe. Can’t picture that. They were beautiful. One in particular. probably still is.”

“Depends on how you define beauty,” Deano said.

“Was one of them your Maltese hairdresser?” I asked.

“No,” Knox said. I guess Knox had lots of girls on his mind, and, on this May day, lots of memories. He looked like he was seeing this one girl and he was going to paint her soon as he got back upstairs in his studio — from his May memory.

The song ended. Silence. Sinatra, dead May fifteenth way back in 1999, was dead at that moment on May 15, 2026 at The Last Mile Lounge. But, as some lyric or other must say — the song lives on. Then, the silence goes on.

“This one in particular, I dated for quite a while, Knox said, breaking the silence. “We met at The Festival.”

Everybody, maybe seven people, wondered, what festival Knox was talking about? But nobody asked. It was strange, but nobody asked — yet I’ll be we all could see a festival — just pictured a festival somewhere, some festival in their lives.

Just imagine seven guys with memories of a festival. And a girl at that festival.

“We had a beautiful time at The Festival,” Knox said.

It was 2:01 p.m.. May 15. The middle of a spring month in the middle of our lives.

A roomful of silent drinkers and dreamers — dreaming of a girl.

The girl at The Festival.