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Barnyard Buckaroos - Part 1
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The one thing you can always count on in summer is that ‘most every weekend there will be a fair. Somewhere, if you look hard enough and are so inclined, you can find a fair to attend. Personally, I don’t go looking for them. There are just certain ones that are, to borrow a phrase from someone, “a part of the fabric of our lives”.
The little local fair in the neighboring county is just such one of those fairs (this year’s theme – “Barnyard Buckaroos”). It qualifies as such for a couple of reasons. In “the old days”, when I was a kid, it used to take place on the last weekend of summer, Labor Day weekend. It was our last breath of freedom before school started. And it was our big opportunity to see friends that we had not seen since the last day of school three months earlier.
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Remember those days? Before school started in the middle of summer? You’d get out of school in early June and look forward to three months of delicious freedom. Living in the country, as I did, we’d strategize about ways to get together, figuring out how to get our parents to drive us to one another’s’ houses, or to gatherings at the afternoon movies in town, or to a swimming party at the river. We knew the parents who were “easy targets” and the ones who could only be called upon once or twice during the entire summer to provide shuttle service.
In those days, we kids had a very busy summer schedule. We worked on our tans. No one knew anything about the dangers of ultra-violet anything back then. We slathered on the Coppertone and baked in the sun for hours, occasionally checking our bikini tan lines and comparing each others’ progress. The darker the better! Now I never leave the house without coating myself with an SPF 5000 sun block and smashing a wide-brimmed hat on top of my head. How times have changed …
In those summer days of yesteryear we read books, listened to records – you know, those vinyl discs we used to have back then – and, if we happened to be at home around 4 in the afternoon, watched the “Mike Douglas Show” which our mothers would undoubtedly have on the TV while they were cooking dinner.
I still remember the anticipation we felt back then as we prepared to attend the fair. We’d carefully pick out the cutest of our new school clothes to wear. And the shoes – oh, my gosh, the shoes! Should we wear new school shoes and risk all of the dirt and dust that goes along with the fair? It was always a very difficult decision that we spent hours on the phone discussing.
I never fail to think of these things when I head to this small local fair each summer. I no longer, of course, spend any time worrying about my clothes or my shoes, but someone makes up for my lack of focus on these things. Can you guess who that might be?
We particularly like these fairgrounds because they are so beautifully situated in the tall pine trees. It makes it more difficult for the set-up of the midway rides, but the grounds are lovely, with lots of shade during the hot summer days. You couldn’t ask for a prettier setting.
This year we arrived hungry, causing us to make a bee-line for “Treat Street”. Every year we each seem to have our favorite “fair food”. Butterfly denied being hungry, which was her way of saying that all she wanted was ice cream.
Fifinella, Maverick and I made our way to the stand selling Mexican food. We all settled for taco salads and shared a side of nachos.
Electric Horseman frequents the same stand every year. That knish seems to call to him.
Despite Butterfly’s example, the rest of us saved our sweet-tooth for later in the day. By then, Butterfly was ready for seconds.
I found chocolate-covered frozen cheesecake on a stick at this place. Could I be happier?
This little fellow pretty much summed up how we felt by the time we left the fair, but gee willikers we’d had a lot of fun. Throughout it all we were laughing and I was taking pictures, of course. So many people would say, as they stood aside, waiting for me to take a photo, “I wish I’d brought my camera!” There were so many amazing sights that I will have to show them to you later – otherwise we’ll be here for hours!
To be continued …
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