All is Fair

October teases us with a few cool days. A touch of cold to the air one morning, two, and then it’s gone again.

On a day once again like summer, my mom and I go to the State Fair.

As we walk through the gates and head toward the crowded lanes, I’m taken back to the magic of going to the Fair when I was a child. Instant time travel. A step into a time capsule.

To that one year when we encountered the candle sculptor. When we, my siblings and I, got to see the craft of candle making done before our wide eyes. The sculptor dipping a candle into vat of hot colored wax after vat of colored wax. And then the carving and shaping of the swirls and arches. The finished product. The creation of something tangible as we watched. The skill of an artisan.

Magic.

That year, my mom brought home a candle in shades of brown and orange, with its intricate swirls that we weren’t supposed to touch for risk of ruining the design. We had it for years and years, a decoration, unburned.

I wonder whatever happened to that candle?

Thirty-plus years later, I’m here again, on the same Fair grounds with my mom. But we don’t stumble across a candle maker as we wander through buildings—though I look for one—past booths selling crafts, knickknacks, tchotchkes, toys. Past kiosks selling funnel cakes, deep fried this, deep fried that, and cotton candy. Past the petting zoo and the stockyard. Past the little Ferris wheel.

When I was little, riding the rides wasn’t part of our Fair experience; too many kids, too many free options to choose from. We had plenty else to see and do then. In those days, we came and went from the Fair without feeling shortchanged. For it was an adventure. A stepping into new worlds for brief moments. An outing. A taste of the strange, the wild, the extravagant.

But then a couple of years ago, when my mom and I squeezed in a Fair visit on a busy afternoon, I had gotten a sudden itch to ride the big Ferris wheel—The Texas Star. On that day, without much time to spend, we had gone to investigate the possibility only to find that the line was too long. One marker on the labyrinthian roped lanes read: 3 hour wait from here.

Neither of us had been in the mood or had the time for that on that day. We’d elbowed our way through the crowds and gone to the butterfly building instead.

But on this day, I find that I still have the itch.

We check the line. It’s not terribly bad. So my mom buys us some tickets and with them in hand, we inch our way through the roped off lanes up to the Ferris wheel.   

The tickets buy two rotations. I find out because I ask. I like to know what to expect.

When it’s finally our turn to get in, we sit opposite a woman and her two kids in a pink bucket. As the ride starts and we leave the lowest position and move upward, the bucket swings a little from the hinge that enables us to hang from the metal wheel. I ask the kids if it’s their first time. I  tell them it is mine. The woman says the kids had done the little Ferris wheel earlier in the day. Because of that they can approach this bigger one as Ferris wheel pros.

What innovative and weird things people do, I think as we rise toward the top and I find myself clutching the bucket’s frame—my survivalist brain telling me this isn’t quite safe. After all, it would be a long and likely non-survivable fall. 

From this height (twenty-stories high at 212 feet and 6 inches), the other rides are clearly visible. Crazy swinging, pendulum rides. Wild dropping rides and ones that play off perceived centrifugal force. Rides that spin and twirl from cables or from the ends of long metal arms. Rides much wilder than this one. I point those rides out to my brain and tell it to calm down.  

There’s downtown Dallas off to my left. Down below, the Fair in its entirety with all its moving parts. There, the world beyond.  

My mom asks me if I remember going to an amusement park when we lived in the northeast. I do. We had ridden the rides that time. A day etched in my memory like the Fair day on which I’d seen the candles being made. Or the year when we hosted a friend’s fiancée who was the sales rep for a dishware company whose claim to fame was unbreakable dishes.

That year, we went to the Fair and made sure to visit the tent so that we could watch her demonstration. She dropped the plates, she clapped them together, she whacked them against a table. See! Unbreakable!

Magic.

Other memories click by: me, standing with my head tilted back waiting for the fifty-five foot tall State Fair icon Big Tex to welcome us to the Fair with his famous line, “Howdy, folks, this is Big Tex!”

The bird shows—raptors flying over our heads and then back to the trainer’s outstretched arm.

The shiny sports cars and gleaming new trucks in the automotive buildings.

Sculptures made of butter. 

Cooking demonstrations. Buy this pan! This set of knives! This perfect seasoning!

Blue ribbons hanging next to award winning jellies, quilts, photos, drawings.

A state-of-the-art robot with tread wheels, fingers that could grasp things, glowing eyes, and a voice box. It was almost real. How much we wanted a robot like that for our own.

How far we’ve come with technology since then.

Magic.

After my mom and I step out of the Ferris wheel bucket, we wander without particular aim, letting our interests guide us.

We see the end of a show with a man in a tight-fitting, red-and-white striped shirt juggling bowling balls. We listen to a puppet show dog sing, “All my exes live in Texas.” We pass a mariachi band. We catch the start of the rodeo. We watch a chainsaw artist add the finishing touches to a wooden bear.

As we wander through the lanes that take us past the Midway games with their oversized stuffed animal prizes, my mom tells me of coming to the Fair when she was a child, of riding the rides and playing the Midway games.

Her childhood experience different from mine. Her adult experience later shared with my child one. Our experience shared together here, now.  

Generations of memories.  

When we’ve had our fill of fun and as the Fair starts to get busy with the early evening crowd, we find our way back to the gates where we’d come in.

“Thanks for coming,” the exit staff member says to us as we walk out of the Fair.  

“Thanks for going with me,” I tell my mom as we get back into the car and head for home.

With the Texas Star getting smaller behind us, I think ahead to the future, to next year or the one after, when I can plan rather than act on impulse, when I can bring my niece and nephew along with me. To see what memories they will make and remember thirty-plus or more years afterwards. To see if the magic will transfer over to them too.