Powerful memories

Sept. 11, 2008

Dear Leslie,

You can't type that date without images of destruction flashing in your head. I wonder how people who were just children seven years ago feel toward it now. Nothing adults do to hide their own fear prevents children from sensing that something is terribly wrong. The Cuban Missile Crisis and President Kennedy's assassination darkened some days in my childhood. The end of the world was possible or seemed so, and Camelot rode off on a riderless horse.

Could that much fear, hormonally shot through young bodies and invading developing psyches for the first time, ever completely go away? Or does it linger, manifesting as fight-or-flight responses to everyday life?

Perhaps other kinds of memories from childhood keep us sane. Some people who didn't grow up in Southeast Missouri have never been to the district fair. For the rest of us, the fair was a childhood rite. We grew up excited about Fair Week and being let out of school early one afternoon to attend. That the fair had the blessing of the board of education meant it must be good for us.

The experience surely is not the same for everyone. My friends and I were only interested in the carnival rides and the midway games. My mom made her children meet her in front of the Arena Building every hour or so, supposedly to dole out more money and prevent us from spending ours all at once. I suspect she also wanted to make sure we hadn't signed up to join the carnival.

For 4-H children, the fair culminates a season of projects, whether raising a cow or sewing a quilt or these days something much more 21st-century. Adults have always been more interested in the grandstand entertainment and the vendors selling gadgets inside the Arena Building.

Everyone salivates over the food. Perhaps a neurobiologist could explain why a corndog and cotton candy taste better accompanied by flashing lights and screams from the midway and the smell of sawdust. The smell of the fair might be the strongest sensory memory, especially when deep-fried foods no longer are on your menu.

In high school, DC won a blue ribbon at the fair for embroidery, and she longs for another. I met my first real girlfriend at the fair, one of those moments when your heart feels like it's jumping on a trampoline. The senses are more alive at the fair. People must fall in love on the Tilt-A-Whirl all the time.

Earlier this week a freckled little girl at the 4-H concession stand asked my octogenarian parents if they had ridden any rides. My mom laughed and said they were too old, but I can't recall her ever riding any rides. The little girl stayed and talked to my parents while our pork burgers were sizzling. The 10-year-old entrepreneur said she likes to entertain her customers while they're waiting for their food.

DC and I didn't ride any rides either, not even the Ferris wheel. We looked at the gadgets in the Arena Building, at the fish the conservation area and at the mules and Belgian horses in the livestock stalls. Being there, not what you do there, seems to be what matters.

In a few weeks, when the carnival rides and the midway have moved on and most signs of the fair are gone, DC will take our dogs to the fairgrounds as she does every year. It's their rite. Hank and Lucy love the smells that linger and must send ripples through their imaginations. Something like that works for humans, too.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.