Fish emulsion and spite defeat the brother while the preserves feud simmers to second place
Fish emulsion and spite defeat the brother while the preserves feud simmers to second place
Thursday. The county fair opened, and I attended in my official capacity as a man who has attended every year since Eisenhower, a credential no one asked for and everyone at the gate has learned to accommodate. The fair is the one institution in this country that has resisted improvement completely, and I mean that as the highest compliment in my vocabulary. The Ferris wheel is the same wheel. The lemonade is the same lemonade, half a lemon doing ceremonial duty atop a pound of sugar. The man guessing weights is a new man but the same man, if you follow me, the position is eternal and the personnel rotate through it like sheriffs.
I went directly to the livestock barns, as any serious fairgoer does, because the midway is for tourists and the barns are for the republic. There is no better citizenship on display in America than a twelve-year-old in boots walking a steer that outweighs her family’s car, calm as a banker, because she has done the work, every dawn of it, and the steer knows it, and the judge knows it, and the ribbon, when it comes, will be the truest credential issued in this county all year. The 4-H program, per the USDA’s own youth pages, has been running this quiet competence factory for over a century, and I would trade a full graduating class of consultants for one barn of those kids, and I would be getting the better of the deal, and the consultants know it, which is why none of them are ever in the barn.
The Zucchini Question
The produce hall this year featured a zucchini the size of a canoe, grown by Herb Ostrander, who has taken Largest Vegetable eleven of the last thirteen years, the two losses being to his own brother, which nearly ended Thanksgiving in their family twice. The giant vegetable classes are the fair’s purest philosophy, because the giant zucchini is inedible, everyone knows it is inedible, it has the interior consistency of attic insulation, and none of that matters, because the category was never about dinner. It is about a man, a seed, and a season of unreasonable devotion, and the ribbon says so. I asked Herb his secret this year and he said, same as every year, fish emulsion and spite, and gestured toward his brother’s entry, a canoe measurably shorter. The judges taped both. Herb by nine inches. Thanksgiving is saved, or ruined, depending which brother you ask.
My wife entered her strawberry preserves again, and again took second to Eileen Vance, and again pronounced the results political, and again is correct, in the sense that Eileen has judged the judges’ bake sale entries kindly for two decades and the ecosystem remembers. This is not corruption, my wife says, it is worse, it is networking. She will enter again next year. The feud is the recipe now. There is more of it in the jar than strawberry. I sampled this year’s batch on toast this morning, for the record, and it is better than Eileen’s, and I have eaten Eileen’s, at a funeral, where lying is discouraged, so my testimony carries weight. Second place. The county will answer for it eventually, in this life or at the next bake sale, whichever convenes first.
The Midway, Briefly
I did walk the midway at dusk, for the lights, which is the only correct reason. The games remain honest in their dishonesty, the rings still slightly too small for the bottles, the basketball rims still whispering ovals, the whole economy running on physics violations that every father demonstrates to every child in an annual ceremony of four dollars lost and one lesson purchased. I watched a young man spend nineteen dollars winning a stuffed banana with dreadlocks for a young woman who could have bought three such bananas for the money, and both of them knew it, and neither cared, because, and here the fair joins the skins economy my grandson explained, nobody pays for the banana. They pay for the story of the banana. The midway understood attention economics a century before the phones did. The phones just removed the corn dogs, which was the mistake.
Closing the Gate
Dispatch filed from the truck with the satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine, and a letter to Britain’s The London Prat, whose correspondent counters with the English village fete, where the categories include Best Six Runner Beans and a vegetable-animal likeness class in which a parsnip resembling their former chancellor took Best in Show, and I have written back requesting the parsnip’s platform, because I have seen our ballot and I am shopping.
Tally, one canoe zucchini certified, one preserves feud renewed at simmer, nineteen dollars converted to one banana story, four corn dogs, personal, no regrets logged. The wheel turned all evening against the dark, same wheel, same lights, and from the top, they say, you can see three counties and your entire childhood. I did not ride. I never ride. I hold the jackets. That is my event, and after all these years, I hold them at a championship level, and the fair, wise as ever, has never once tried to improve me either.
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