MISSISSIPPI COUNTY MAN SENTENCED

A Mississippi County, Mo., man was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on felony drug charges for making methamphetamine.

Ronnie W. Lane, 49, was sentenced to 151 months in prison without parole on one felony count of attempting to manufacture meth. He appeared in federal court in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Rodney W. Sippel.

With his sentencing, Lane has admitted that he was attempting to make meth.

On Dec. 18, 1999, Charleston, Mo., police stopped a vehicle in which Lane was a passenger. Officers noticed that there were two cans of ether in Lane's pocket.

Officers than asked him to step out of the car and he dropped a small, clear bottle of what appeared to be methamphetamine.

Lane agreed to let police search his home at 400 N. Locust St. in Charleston. During the search, several items were seized, including pseudoephedrine boxes, coffee filters, a Pyrex bowl with a brown substance, rubber gloves, syringes and a mirror with a residue. Lane admitted to police that he was using these items to make meth.

RIDING THE UNIVERSAL LAWS ON THE MIDWAYHeadline: LETTERS FROM HOME: RIDING THE UNIVERSAL LAWS ON THE MIDWAY

"It's so noisy at the fair

but all your friends are there"

-- Neil Young, "Sugar Mountain"

Dear Julie,

The Southeast Missouri District Fair, an annual sentimental journey to our agricultural origins and to our childhoods, is upon us.

You'd think in a sophisticated age of virtual reality games and Internet access to the world, 4-H livestock competitions and carnival rides and fluffy cotton candy would be anachronisms. Maybe things are going that way. But the thrills inside a computer game aren't the same as defying gravity, and the smell of sawdust and taste of a corn dog can't be experienced at a Web site yet.

Lots of people in Southeast Missouri still live on farms or are only a generation removed. We still have vegetable gardens. So far, we are not too cool to go to the fair.

The fair is a fixed point in our whirling world, its unchangeableness making the years' changes in ourselves all the more evident.

For kids the fair is still magical. It's noisy and crowded, just the way you like the world to be. It's also overrun with persons of your same size. The barkers are just as scary as the rides, yet you're dying to win something big and stuffed.

The universal law of the midway is that nobody wins much except the person in the trailer counting the money, but no kid cares.

It is easier to win prizes earlier in the day because the midway operators want the stuffed animals circulating as advertisements, DC says. She still has the teddy bear her brother won in a game of skill and the blue ribbon awarded for her schoolgirl embroidery.

At age 11 or so, the fair becomes a giant hormonal dance. Gangs of girls and gangs of boys in search of each other take over the midway. Newton's Law of Gravitation -- the force of the attraction between two given particles is inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart -- eventually results in lovesickness as the orbit around the midway becomes smaller and the "particles" more familiar to each other. Prizes are awarded.

"Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain,

with the barkers and the

colored balloons

you can't be 20, on Sugar Mountain,

though you're thinkin' that you're leavin' there too soon."

The fair doesn't hold the same possibilities for awe and romance once you're no longer a teen-ager. Then it becomes too noisy and too crowded, but you still go because going to the fair is part of you by now. Walking around the midway or sitting at a barbecue stand, you run into people you haven't seen in months or years, and the fair becomes a reunion.

In middle age, your harvest years, the livestock and prize-winning produce become the most interesting part of the fair. In a time when many fruits and vegetables are available in supermarkets almost year-round, the fair is a reminder of the cycle and universal law that underlies all endeavors in the natural world: Before you reap, you must sow.

If you've given up rock 'n' roll for country music, there's plenty to hear. You avoid the corn dogs because you've finally realized you aren't immortal and they're poison on a stick.

But you must still go on the Tilt-A-Whirl. DC says anyone too old for the Tilt-A-Whirl should stay home.

Some old-timers say they don't go to the fair anymore. I suspect they're avoiding the teen-age energy vibration, staying out of orbit.

But even those of us who go to the fair still miss it in one way or another.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.