Write about a brief encounter.

Heritage Farm, Kewaunee, Wisconsin

I am at a Kolache Festival in Kewaunee, in northeastern Wisconsin. It will be my first time eating kolaches, a traditional Czech food made with kneaded dough and a variety of fillings like fig, cherry, and strawberry. I have my Canon digital SLR with me to record the event, and have spent a lot of time the previous several days reading up on how to better use my camera. 

It was a beautiful Wisconsin Sunday morning. The sky was clear. The sun was shining brightly. The corn was green and growing tall. It was picture-perfect day for the Kewaunee Kolache Festival.

My friend, Julie, has come with me. As soon as we arrived, I was mesmerized by all the things I could photograph. Many Czech people were dressed in traditional, colorful costumes. There were polka bands. There was a restored barn. There were horses grazing in fields. There were windmills. There was antique farm equipment. There was an outdoor beer and brat bar. The farm was filled with people, food, music, and excitement!

The Czech women had worked several days in 24-hour shifts to prepare over 7,000 kolaches to sell at the Kolache Festival. Julie and I positioned ourselves in the crowded kolache line. Julie would buy a few dozen kolaches to bring back to her family and friends and had come prepared with a kolache cooler. These Kolache Festival kolaches are that famous!

I bought two kolaches to try out -- a fig kolche and a berry kolache. They were really good! I decided I wanted a dozen to take home, too. While Juie went to the car to put her kolaches in the cooler, I got back in line. When I reached the kolache table, there were three lone kolaches on a white paper plate. Assuming there were more kolaches in the kitchen, I asked for a dozen kolaches.

"These are all the kolaches that are left," the woman told me.

I could feel the breathing of the kolache hopefuls behind me. It was only 9:30 on the second day of the event and already the over 7,000 kolaches had sold out! I was no fool! I took the last three kolaches. As three is the number of spiritual balance, I felt a sacred connection with the kolache three and knew these three kolaches were meant to be mine. I also felt a sense of kolache kismet to have purchased the last of the Kolache Festival kolaches at my first kolache festival.

Julie and I had arrived early to attend the polka mass. Probably a thousand people were packed into a large community room. It was bedlam. I'm not Catholic, but the polka mass was amazing! In the ensuing years I'm going to be sure to arrive early enough to get a seat closer to the band. Also the priest who spoke was a crack up! He shared the love of God through laughter -- especially as he was an IRISH priest (at a Czech heritage event). Everyone loved him. The mass and polka music were a blessing, and they set a joyful mood for the day ahead.

After the mass all the tables were moved and the room was prepared for the Czech "dinner", polka music and dancing. We decided to walk around outside because our dinner ticket put us in the 1:30 line -- we had more than two hours to wait before we would be able to eat.

I had taken pictures of the polka band during the mass. I had noticed that no one else around me was taking photos. So it wasn't just that I had a digital SLR, but no one else seemed interested in taking pictures.

As we walked out of the huge dance hall, I noticed another photographer. He was a man in his 50's. He was tall. Had a full head of sandy-colored hair. His was handsome. He was fit. He was dressed in jeans and a white shirt. He wore leather loafers and a leather belt. He was impeccably groomed. He had two cameras around his neck, one with a 50mm lens, the other with a zoom. He moved through the crowd with confidence. He knew some of the people and stopped to talk with them. I was held spellbound. Gorgeous man with two digital cameras! Maybe he would see my camera and stop and talk with me!

Julie and I walked out into the sunshine. I stopped to photograph the windmills. I love windmills. I've never had any windmills to photograph until I moved to Wisconsin in June of 2011. I wanted to play with the light on the windmills, to catch their color and the shadows just right.

After we'd killed an hour we decided to go back inside the hall and wait for our turn for dinner. The polka music was playing and people were dancing. Julie and I sat at a table alongside the dance floor so we could watch them. Most were elderly couples in their 70's, 80's and 90's! Their gray hair and faces showed their ages, but their grace and agility on the dance floor made them seem to be in their 20's. As they danced past me, hopping and spinning to the oompahs of the lively polka music, I tried to imagine these couples in their youth, imagined they had fallen in love while dancing -- and that dancing was what had held their love together as they weathered life's storms. I wanted to know their stories.

I got lost in my thoughts, carried away by the music and the twirl of colorful Czech skirts. Then through the sea of polka dancers, gorgeous man appeared -- taller than anyone else in the room, confident, on a mission. He walked the perimeter of the dance floor, photographing the dancers. I watched his agile movements as he'd stop, scope out his shot, position his athletic body, and then raise the camera to his face. It took several shots before I had what I had been waiting for -- a clear view of his left hand; I silently breathed a sigh of joyous relief as I realized there was no gold band.

Suddenly he turned and handed his camera to a man behind him. The man was laden like   a pack mule, with camera bags and equipment draped around his torso. He handed Gorgeous man another camera with a different lens. Gorgeous man had an assistant! He must be very important; probably from a newspaper, I thought.

Gorgeous man's companion was his antithesis. His legs were short. He was overweight; his belly hung over his unbelted pants. His head of dark hair looked greasy. His clothing was wrinkled. His shirt was loose and coming untucked. He walked hunched over and with a waddle. Even from across the room he appeared a nervous man, with shifting, beady eyes. Suddenly I saw Cervantes' Don Quixote and "his faithful companion," Sancho Panza. And I had just been photographing windmills! 

I watched Don Quixote and Sancho Panza work the dance floor. They exchanged cameras seemlessly, without speaking. My own digital SLR now seemed embarrassingly meager.

By now another friend had joined me and Julie. I pointed Don Quixote out to them. We talked about him and I confessed my interest in him. They agreed, based soley on appearance, that he would be a good catch.

After a while Don Quixote and Sancho Panza left the dance hall. My friends and I ate our dinners and decided to go back outside. I looked around, but did not see Don Quixote or his companion.

The day was blazing hot and soon we were ready to leave. We headed towards the bathrooms; we had a long drive back to Green Bay. As I came into the now nearly-empty lobby of the dance hall, there stood Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote looked directly at me and my camera, which was now hung around my neck. I don't know where the courage came from, but I walked up to this incredibly handsome and confident man and we began a conversation about cameras. 

Sancho Panza tried to join in, but he was quickly dismissed as Don Quixote and I had eyes only for each other. We talked about our cameras. We talked about methods. We talked about what we liked to photograph. He worked for a Wisconsin travel magazine with offices in Madison, but lived in the Green Bay area. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt with him, and how shamelessly I was flirting. I'm fairly pretty, youthful looking, intelligent -- but I'm 80 pounds overweight. Where I'm from in Southern California, a man like this would not give a woman like me the time of day.

My friends had now completed their time in the bathroom and were standing behind the man, smiles on their faces as they watched us banter. They were happy for me. I haven't been in a relationship in many years.

And then he told me his name and the company he worked for and how I could contact him. I told him my name. Did I tell him Dulcinea? We said cheerful goodbyes and parted.

As we walked into the parking lot, my friends and I huddled together and giggled like schoolgirls. 

"He was so into you," they agreed.

"He was so easy to talk to," I said, and shared our conversation with them.

By the time we got to the car, I realized that I had forgotten his name and the company where he worked. I've never been good at remembering details. I then realized that unless it was the will of the gods to bring us together at another event, meeting Don Quixote at a kolache festival on a Kewaunee farm on an August Sunday afternoon would never be more than what it had been -- a brief, but memorable and enjoyable encounter.