Fairs always come in the dog days of summer, when July is a memory and insects saw the air all day in the heat. People crowd the Fair grounds to ride the rides, eat the greasy food, and see the livestock. There's something a little magical in the above paragraph. It conjures up something extraordinary and ordinary at the same time. The carnival lights. Smells of hay and manure. Elephant ears dusted with powdered sugar.
This dog day of summer was spent traveling. We took our time. Stopped when we wanted to stop. My nephew and son spent almost 40 minutes wandering in the woods by a rest area. At the end, we took a thirty minute Dairy Queen break, sitting near the shores of Lake Superior in the early evening, eating a banana cream pie Blizzard.
I am back home now, settling back into my everyday life. I've unpacked. Tomorrow, it's McDonald's for breakfast and playing the pipe organ for church in the afternoon. The Lawrence Welk Show in the evening. I won't go further than that. It will just depress me.
The dog days don't last long. Soon, the leaves are going to start changing colors. Darkness will come earlier and earlier. In a couple of weeks, my fall schedule kicks in. Teaching. Students. Meetings. Less family time. More work time. Another season of change. And you all know how much I love change.
Once upon a time, a pig herder named Sheldon lived in the Emerald Forest. In late summer, Sheldon brought all of his pigs to the Emerald County Fair, where he sold them to a butcher named Frank. Frank took the pigs home and made sausages out of all of them, even the pretty sow named Ezmerelda who could balance a ball on her snout.
When the Fair ended, Sheldon went back to his cottage in the Emerald Forest and started a new job as a contingent instructor in the Livestock Department at Ye Olde University. Sheldon didn't have medical insurance or benefits. Half way through his first semester of teaching, he started having hallucinations and high fevers.
Sheldon went to the local leech man Travis. After Travis bled Sheldon a few times, he gave the former pig herder the bad news: Sheldon had mad pig disease, probably contracted by becoming a little too close with Ezmerelda, if you know what I mean.
Sheldon slowly lost all his hair and spent the rest of his life running through the Emerald Forest naked, singing the theme song to Gilligan's Island. He died bald and sun-burned.
Moral of the story: use sunscreen all the time.
And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.
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| A three hour tour...a three hour tour... |
