(no subject)

There's something oddly mystical about going to a county fair. I must have been about ten when my family took me to my last one. It was late afternoon-going-on-night, and everything was huge and bright with multi-colored bulbs, and resplendant in smooth metallic paint that the lights of the rides twinkled deep inside like beckoning fairies, and there were all the giant animals I'd only read about all lined up in little stalls, snuffling and blinking and baying, and across from the pens the rotating tunnel into the fun house was a spiraling portal to a small pocket of a different reality, and in the booth next door the little ducks that floated in a never-ending circle pulled my eyes away until I saw the array of glass bottles in the next, all stem-up to the sky, so many that you couldn't possibly miss all of them with that little ring, and I so wanted to throw one until I saw the booth with stacks of beanbags to hurl at milk-bottle pyramids and the gigantic bigger-than-I-was stuffed tigers and whales and Sylvester the Cats, and yet it all fell away as I looked up at the end of the aisle of little wooden windows into wonder and watched the impossibly tall metal contraptions, towering over the land as they spun the people they carried in dizzying circles, or swung them back and forth, over and over, like a giant cartoon hypnotist's watch, or jerked them up and down, up and down, like a colossal yo-yo while I shoveled handfuls of caramel popcorn into my mouth with fingers still slippery with butter from the ear of unpopped corn that preceded them. It all seemed to go on forever.

Perhaps it's just as well that I didn't have my camera with me today when posicat and I went to the Lake County Fair after work today. I can't imagine a single static image that would convey the essence of what I felt there. No, it wasn't the same experience that I remember. How could it be? I'm older. I'm more experienced. Sometimes, glimpses of the mundanity under the surface sneaked up on me: the shifty looking boothies watching the crowd; the conspicuous police escort around a particular attendee; the ridiculous prices of food and drinks and games.

But while I was there, on the grounds of the fair, those glimpses were not enough to take the feeling of rediscovered childhood, of the wonder and magic and even fear of the unknown, away from me. For a few hours, in pieces though those hours may have been, I was a small child looking in awe at a vast unexplored world like the ones in the fantasy novels I spent innumerable hours poring through, a world that I somehow got to be a part of for a precious short span. It was a wonderful way to spend an evening.