I sit at a booth at a sidewalk sale during the Sugar Festival. It is the heat of early afternoon and people have already left off shopping the dwindling downtown. Up and down the sidewalks, elderly shop keepers and artisans are packing up their wares. The air is heavy with the humidity of resignation and happy disappointment. The Festival congers up nostalgic images of the community those elderly patrons and purveyors once knew.

The main source of traffic is the steady stream of young people cruising center. In defiance of the nostalgia, car after car vibrate by, the bass too strong for Detroit steel to handle: it buzzes rather than resonates. The urban beats and hip-hop expletives hit the farm town streets with a hard insurrection. Even I, perhaps the youngest curb sitter, nearly 30, am reproached for my age.

I recall a family vacation to Branson Missouri when I was a teen. The country music atmosphere and senior tour busses made me feel like I was in an assisted living twilight zone. We went to what, in retrospect, was a great concert by violinist Shoji Tabuchi. Shoji fiddled to just about any kind of music, jazz, bluegrass, and Broadway. Before intermission, he pointed this out and challenged the audience to try to stump him with another music style. My brother and I looked at each other with a crooked smile. There is no way, we thought, that a place like this could produce the music we were listening to. We were wrong, after the intermission he did a rap version of “The Ballad of Jed Clampett.”

After the concert, my brother and I went to our van, thoroughly disgusted with the world’s lack of sensitivity to youth. We popped in a tape of, dare I admit it, gangster rap? We blasted it to the parking lot of smiling seniors, inflicting our fierce youth upon them.

Perhaps it is the way young people respond to a world that doesn’t understand them. Perhaps it is their way of saying that they don’t feel apart of the community. Hopefully we can smile like the seniors in the Branson parking lot and find ways to embrace their youth making them part of the community the Sugar Festival celebrates.