COUNTY FAIR

A while back Pat and I went to the Crow Wing County Fair. We try to get down there almost every year and have found that not a lot changes. Same old cows and horses, just a year older, and I guess that goes two ways. But the smell of the barn brings back some farm memories to me that need refreshing from time to time. I have always said, if I had it to do all over again, it would have been on a farm of my own. Something about roosters crowing in the morning and a kinship with a bunch of animals, whose yearning eyes look like Labrador dogs at a rib fest. 

The rest of the exhibits are fun, too, but all of this is just part of the reason we go, and not the main one at that. It’s the people we meet and jabber with that makes it all worthwhile. Pat taught nursing at C.L.C. for a long time, and so she knows a lot of people in the Brainerd area. If not a student, another teacher. If not a teacher, then a patient she took care of somewhere. Then, surprise, surprise every now and then when, believe it not, we find someone who fesses up to knowing me, too. I often try to imagine what couples say about us after we leave. Probably goes something like this. “Wow, the years have been tough on him, haven’t they?  I wonder what she sees in him, anyway. She looked good. Bet he was looking for a nurse when he found her. Old farts get kind of needy in their old age, don’t they?”

All joking aside, the county fairs are the grass roots of the get-togethers that are called fairs. It’s a place where you can show off your canning, crafts, paintings, and photography skills. Where 4H’ers can display their animals and farming skills. For many of them, it’s a prelude to the state fair a few weeks later. It’s a place where farming equipment, from a time gone by, is dusted off and put on display. A place where the little ones get to spin around on the carnival rides until they throw up all the candy and ice cream they just ate. Ah yes, good times.

I remember talking to my father once about farmers and I told him, “They always look so tired.” He said, “Most of them are tired, but it’s that good kind of tired that comes from working at something you love so much that you don’t know when to stop.” It’s a job that is never finished. It’s a job when husbands, wives, and entire families come together to make it work, because it’s bigger than one person can ever handle, and move over prostitutes, because it’s older than your profession. Later, we went down to the grandstand, found a bench, and took in some Country Classics music. Somewhere between “The year that Clayton Delaney Died” and “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” my emotions got the best of me. I looked at Pat and said, “Damn Allergies.”

The Crow Wing County Fair has resisted change over the years. Efforts to serve alcohol, and charge for admission, have been rebuked. People love it for the way it is, and has been, and they know that once the progressive thinkers get their way and the nostalgia wears off, it will become just another beer party or money maker, and all of the wistful affection for the ways of the past will go away. “Yes, they’ll all come to see me in the shade of that old oak tree, as they lay me ‘neath the green, green grass of home.”