Today, I went to our town’s fair, the biggest agricultural in the state. It’s great—cows and chickens and baby goats and giant donuts and little kids getting their faces painted. The weather was perfect; cool enough for a jacket in the morning, which was wrapped around my waist by the afternoon.
But there were a few things that were just completely wrong for the day, the venue, the spirit of the fair.
For example…As McIrish and I walked down the big hill, eating our giant donuts, we saw something terribly out-of-place and, indeed, ridiculous.
A yoga demonstration. Listen, you yoga people. We’re here to eat blooming onions and pulled pork sandwiches and funnel cakes and drink blue liquid! Take your limberness and green tea and get out! How dare you remind us that we’ve just eaten 1200 calories! I’m surprised they were even allowed in. Never again, if I have anything to say about it.
Hot tubs. Do people say, “You know what I’d love as a souvenir from today? A hot tub!” I don’t get the appeal of buying a hot tub at a fair, but there are the hot tub dealers, year after year.
Llamas. Fine, fine, they’re considered farm animals. Just not in my book. In my book, they’re terrifying nightmare animals who bite and spit. And my God, the smell.
A walking stick! Or is it?
That Weird Thing Everyone Buys That Year. One year, it was the rubber broom. My mother bought one. Supposedly, it would sweep up dog hair in a way that a mere broom-broom could only dream of doing. Mom bought two. “These don’t work as well as I thought,” she confessed the next week. Shocking. This year, it was walking sticks. I thought they were broom handles (perhaps from the rejected rubber brooms), but apparently not. These were special and different from broom handles because they had a loop on one end. Someone is getting very rich off this idea.
Oh, but it was a wonderful few hours! There’s nothing like our fair. (By the way, the title of this blog was swiped from my friend’s book: The Universe of Fair by Leslie Bulion. A great story for middle-grade readers!)
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