LETTERS FROM HOME: THE LEGACY OF MIDWAY FLIRTATIONS AND BLUE-RIBBON CHERRY PIES

Sept. 17, 1998

Dear Patty,

When the minister of DC's church asked the congregation for the usual prayers last Sunday, a kid among the pews brought down the House of God by proposing they give thanks for the fair."

She probably meant the carnival atmosphere, of course, but the SEMO District Fair is more than the Doppler screams from the rides and parents' P.A. appeals to children who don't want to be found.

The fair is part of our collective memory bank of getting drenched in the rain that always muddies a day or two, of flirtations on the midway, of blue ribbons like those DC still has.

It links us to ancestors who raised their own food and made their own clothes. In just a few generations we have become so far removed from that way of life that we sometimes think of a warmed can of soup as home cooking.

I may be married to one of the rare Americans under the age of 50 who knows how to darn a sock. DC pulled one over a light bulb and showed me how to darn once. Fascinating, I said, how about darning another one?

Some of Cape Girardeau's most popular restaurants serve meals that simulate home cooking. They serve greens, cornbread and beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, and chicken and dumplings to crowds of people who grew up eating real food but don't fix it anymore because it's too much trouble.

Now we can buy cereal and milk in the same single-serving package to save us the bother of measuring out the right amounts of cereal and milk in a bowl.

At the fair, blue ribbons are still distributed for canning, though I don't know anybody who knows anybody who still cans food. We are creatures of another age.

Two places I went to recently underscored that truth.

One was a building in St. Louis that houses hundreds of tropical butterflies.

A quote from Picasso was posted outside the entrance to the glassed-in conservatory.

"If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen ... you mustn't touch them."

It seems both practical warning to inquisitive children and observation on the ungraspable nature of beauty.

The ancient Greeks believed the butterfly was the form the soul took when it left the body. Now we have buildings for butterflies so city folk can see them.

Then there were the artifacts from the ancestors of the Incas on display in Memphis. Some of these civilizations were doing mummification thousands of years before the Egyptians, and their handiwork was on display.

DC didn't like the exhibit much, mainly because some of these cultures were violent and indulged in human sacrifice. One of them paid homage to a deity called the "Decapitation god."

But the show made a salient point: that when we examine the legacies of ancient civilizations, often all we know of them is revealed in their art -- in all the expansiveness that word can contain.

The Incan ancestors left no written records but their pottery and feather tunics and Machu Picchu have deepened our still shallow understanding of how they married the natural and supernatural worlds.

What we know of our own immediate ancestors is in their works -- their houses and buildings, their quilts, the workmanship in their furnishings, the knowledge they have passed along to us.

When we lose the ability to grow a cucumber, to bake a cherry pie, to tell a story, the heritage we pass along to the children on the merry-go-round is thinned, like a gravy made with water instead of milk.

The carnival rides may have moved that kid to prayer, but the rest will bring her back year after year.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.