Spend a little time at the Ohio State fair and you make some realizations:
how many people there are in the world
how many people there are who do not own mirrors
how many people have no idea what size clothing they should actually wear
how many people don’t care what size clothing they now wear
how many people will eat anything as long as it's deep-fried
how many bad tattoos there are out there
how many women bleach their hair- but not nearly often enough.
how many jobs there are that make mine look really rewarding.
I am not a midway person. I don’t go to the fair for the Flying Bobs and the spinning-this and the barfing-that. The noise and confusion and weird smells of the midway do not attract me. I have no desire to win a giant smurf by throwing darts or to have some obnoxious man guess my weight, for God’s sake! I like the other side of the fair.
We ride the sky glider (smooch whenever it stops!) and check out the commercial buildings (Magnetic bracelets that cure disease! Rhinestone T-shirts. Surgical stainless steel cookware that uses water instead of oil! Healthful! Nutritious! Expensive and would pretty much require me to, you know, cook!)
This year, instead of hanging out at the Natural Resources park we decided to hit the little buildings on either side of the main thoroughfair- you know, the places no one goes, because they’re all marching under the sky glider getting their weight guessed and seeing how many things they can eat fried on a stick.
We saw fine arts (some very fine indeed, some kind of “eh”), quilts, blue-ribbon pies and cookies (I’ll be honest- they looked just like the red ribbon cookies to me) an utterly amazing cake that looked like a table. There was a set of hand-carved spoons that blew us away. Did you know you can even enter your scrapbook page in the state fair and win a ribbon? Then do you make a scrapbook of your experiences at the fair complete with photographs of your prize-winning scrapbook page…
We left the hot, extremely crowded street and poked our heads in a small building we couldn’t remember ever being in before. Here were exhibits from science fairs, the Invention Convention, school design competitions, etc. The boy scouts had an area with a tent, a boat and a gizmo for winding twine into rope, and girl scouts had exhibits of muffins and blouses. (Now see, if the girl scouts had been more about making rope and messing around in tents and less about being a freakin housewife, I might have stayed in Girl Scouts a little longer than I did!)
There was an exhibit of entries into a contest to design the best wing to fly a rudimentary glider, and something that appeared to be a cardboard chute to run Rice Chex through… ok clearly that needed more explaination than was provided. But it was neat. This and 4-H are the kind of thing I think a "fair" should be about. This building was clearly the best-kept secret of the fair: cool, quiet, peaceful- as in almost no one was there. Perfect escape from the very madding crowd, and one we’ll remember for next year.
We got some food and decided not to go see the prize-winning turnips and gourds- maybe next year. Instead we entered the Stackhouse Colliseum to see what kind of horse shows were scheduled. Turns out- it was the cow kind. Holstein futurities.
Now I’m reasonably fond of cows: ice cream and I go way back. Cows have eyes like Bambi and smell like fresh hay. I usually cruise happily through the dairy barns at the fair, so we decided to sit a spell and watch the cow judging. Maybe when this was over there would be horses.
There were 23 cows in the ring, whose human escorts were constantly either trying with all their might to drag the cow forward or throwing their body weight into stopping it from running into the cow in front of it. The organ, which usually plays some peppy, mindless tune during horse shows, was softly playing an elevator music version of “Feelings” (oh wait- that’s redundant) at funeral dirge speed as the cows inched their way around the ring.
Well, we don’t want to get those cows riled up with a polka, now do we?
“I like the black and white one” I said, and sipped my lemon shake-up. 5 minutes later and the cows were still inching around the ring, with no commentary from the officials as to what was going on, what they were being judged on (size of the udder? Volume of the bellows of protest?) The organ struck up “My Funny Valentine” as they slowly turned their cows around and walked in the other direction.
“I feel the urge for a hamburger” I said.
“No- a glass of milk” Ted corrected.
What I actually had was an urge to grab the microphone and say “…and trot, please! Everyone trot your animals!” like they do in the horse shows. “And canter! Da de-ad-de de da de!”
Ted pulled out his blackberry and googled to find out what exactly a "futurity" is- it's basically cow poker, where you bet on your cow being able to win back when it's a baby, and every few months you either have to see the bet or fold. See, fairs can be educational.
I passed another few minutes watching the little boys with big shovels hurry around cleaning up the ring. One cow right in front of us lifted her tail- and the little boy caught it before it could hit the ground. I started a round of applause for him. Oh here’s a little fun fact for ya: did you know that the exhibitors, after their cow is done relieving itself… wipe the cow’s ass with a paper towel? If I’m lyin, I’m dyin. I’m not a squeamish person, but that grossed me out just a bit.
Finally finished with the Holstein parade, they began lining the cows up. We thought we were almost done. Ha! Do you know how long it takes to line up 23 cows? The organ struck up Glen Campbell “By the Time I get to Phoenix”
“By the time they get these cows out of here, I’ll be a grandmother!”
They finally got them in line, stood there milling and mooing for a bit… and…. they walked them down to the other end of the arena and lined them up down there!
“This is riveting”
“Wa-ay to much excitement for me. Let’s go get something else to eat.”
Now I"ll never know if that back and white cow won or not.
They have something new this year: Goat playground. Which consists of some baby goats in a pen with some playground stuff. It was kind of a bust as none of the goats were showing any interest in any of the playground equipment, but should one have been seized by the sudden urge to go down the slide, there it was. Moving on. We saw some lovely dogs but missed the agility demonstrations. No pig races. Saw some very newborn lambs and a cow that may well have become a mother a few hours later.
And of course, people. People in all colors, shapes and sizes. Friendly people, rude people, scary people- just so many people that one becomes concerned that we are breeding like bacteria and will soon kill our host. Or… maybe it’s only me who thinks like that.
As we walked past the kiddie rides I had a sudden vision of Katie and Stephen on the little dragon rollercoaster, smiling and waving at me as they went by. It was a lovely memory, and made me feel a little sad, too.
Another tradition is to get a funnel cake and a bag of kettle corn on the way out. I spend the whole time at the fair eyeballing the people with funnel cakes and resisting other temptations so that I can indulge myself. The older I get the less of one I want to actually eat, but I always want one.
Time to go home. We held hands and enjoyed the lovely sunset clouds as we walked through the parking lot, waving to the Highway patrol officers busily getting their roadside flares set out. You have NOT been directed in traffic until you've been directed by the Ohio State Highway Patrol. These folks take parking seriously.
If the state fair wasn’t 15 minutes from our house, now that the kids are grown, we probably wouln’t even go. But as Ted said, it’s a tradition: our late summer date-night. It reminds me of summers gone by: the year we were newlyweds and we bought a print from an artist exhibiting there because it reminded us of our honeymoon. The first year I bought the kids ride bands, and we stayed all day, and I let them go off for short excursions by themselves as long as they stayed together, and they were so excited and happy and thought they were awfully grown up. And the year a bunch of us from Vinton County Camp came to the fair, and Beth and I got stuck on this ride ‘cause the operator forgot to let us out of our car and we were screaming and crying every time we whirled past him “Please! Let us out!!”.
And the years when my grandparents had a craft booth at the fair and we would roam the fair on our own, listening to the bands and the choir, drinking A&W rootbeer floats, watching the other crafters and just soaking in those last, bright, frantic days of summer.
Which is probably why I like the State Fair so much. It's not the quilts or the sky glider or the food or the horse shows- it's the summers of my life, from child to parent to middle age, strolling down the avenue with the smoke from roasting corn and the music of the midway and the laughter of all the people surrounding me. It's where I came from, and where part of me will always be…. sitting there in the arena, waiting for that damn cow show to finish.
Tracy Meisky is a poet, writer, singer, songwriter and all-around boat rocker from way back. Feel free to look around, but if you break it, you bought it.