In seven hours
In seven hours I will be in my car on the way to State Fair, dressed in my ever-stylish ensemble of jeans, dirty tennis shoes, and raggedy old sweater. My rain jacket is waiting in the closet. It will rain. It always rains at State Fair.
I will wander into the barn area and say hello to the horses, probably annoying anyone who is actually showing because most general Fair visitors are idiots. I still remember the year a dad carried his perhaps-six-year-old daughter up to the stall row and told her she could pet the horses, despite the signs saying not to do that. Exasperated, she tossed her pigtails and wailed “Daddy! Can’t you read? They bite!”
If only all parents had the sense their children do. The kid’s comment was helped, I’m sure, by the fact that the horse the father was heading towards had his ears pinned back and eyes rolling because he was not, to put it lightly, a people horse. I steered them toward my older, gentler, greatly-missed Saint. And minutes later had to jump in front of a well-meaning parent who was about to feed my horse an apple. A normal activity, I know, but apple seeds can show up on a drug test as a banned drug. Weird, huh? How do you tell a five year old that they cannot, in fact, feed the horse an apple?
And by the fourth day of the show and six hundred kids later, how do you do so politely? You don’t, of course. You hope you’re stabled next to the cranky horse with his ears pinned back and his eyes rolling so everyone will gravitate down the stall row to the Saint.
Unless, of course, you own the Saint.
So I will show up this year not with an apple in hand but with an old, raggedy towel. I will scrape boots and polish hooves and set up the jumps they knock down in the warm-up ring. I will walk horses between classes. I will write names on ribbons when classes are done and I will hold martingales when riders finish their jumping rounds and head back for the flat class.
And if I am lucky I will see a class or two as well.
Sometime this weekend I’ll return to the Fair, but I won’t return to the horse show. I’ll slip by unannounced and make my way into the fairgrounds proper, something I haven’t done for eight years. I will find the funnel cakes I barely remember and peek in at the giant pumpkins and lettuce heads.
But before I enjoy the Fair everyone else knows, I am going to enjoy the Fair I know. I am prepared: I have my bag with clean shoes and socks for the ride home (the ones I wear in the morning will be soaked). I have my bug dope and my lotion. I have a towel and some gloves. I’ve found shirts to layer on each other and a hat to conceal my raggedy hair.
Seven hours. All I need is some sleep.