Iknew things wouldn’t be dull when I saw a kid carrying a giant reggae banana. He must have won it at the balloon-popping booth, and I have never seen a more mellow-looking piece of produce. It even had dreadlocks and a striped Jamaican tam. I half expected the Calypso fruit doll to break into “Come Mr. Tally Man” any minute.
Wouldn’t you know that I’ve lived in Searcy for more than 10 years now, and this was my first time to experience that apex of the social season known as the White County Fair. But the weather was just right, and I had just enough time to kill on a Saturday. So I headed to the fairgrounds, paid my $8 and joined the madness.
As soon as I stepped through the gate, I gazed up at the Ferris wheel with a mixture of dread and longing. I have a terrible fear of heights. Sometimes it’s so bad I have to take a Dramamine just to step up on the curb. I also knew, though, that it was about time I faced my phobia. And I couldn’t resist the 80s joke: “It’s my day off. I should take a ride with Ferris.”
But not quite yet. I still had to work up my nerve, and I thought the petting zoo might be a tranquil place to start. So I invested $2 in a tiny bag of sliced carrots and hung out for a while with an alpaca, a zeedonk and an assortment of goats. You would be surprised how many veggie handfuls a pygmy goat can eat. And considering you can buy a bag of whole carrots at Wal-Mart for $1.48, I may have gotten the short end of the carrot stick.
But did the petting zoo have a soothing effect? You bet your llama, and I can prove it. From there I went straight to the exhibit hall and had my blood pressure checked at the Harding pharmacy school booth. My reading was 115 over 78, which is exactly the same numbers Bobby McFerrin has when he sings “Don’t Worry — Be Happy.”
But despite having my blood pressure cleared for the Ferris wheel, I still wasn’t ready. So I checked out the exhibits. I saw blue-ribbon zucchini, prize-winning needlepoint and the “Best in Show” pumpkin that weighed 87 pounds. The canned preserves were lovely, but the poor flower display — bless its heart — had seen better days.
Next I watched my first tractor pull. It was a new experience to see farmers hauling 5,700 pounds’ worth of weights in the dirt. One guy made it 158 feet before his John Deere popped a wheelie, right there in the arena. I would think that sight would have whipped the crowd into a frenzy, but it didn’t. The calm audience sat motionless. Not a single hoop or holler. I did see a teenager turn and spit on the ground, at which point his stoic father said, “Settle down, son.”
This was a little too much for my blood pressure, so off I went to the livestock show. I surveyed everything from Shetland ponies to spangled chickens, each with either a blue, red or white ribbon. I felt sorry for the poultry that had only gotten a “C” rating. Being a chicken is not much of a life anyway, but how do you live it down when you’ve been officially labeled as mediocre? I would think your “coup cred” would never be the same.
However, seeing those poor middling chickens made me think, “What have I got to lose?” So I marched on over to the Ferris wheel, handed my tickets to the operator, and sat in a bucket headed — as far as I knew — straight for outer space. Two kids who were standing in line behind me were herded into my bucket. Their names were Luke and Lauren.
As the wheel lurched upward, I began rethinking the wisdom of having ordered the All-Star Breakfast at the Waffle House that morning. To distract myself from the feeling that my buttered toast was also lurching upward, I struck up a conversation with Luke, who couldn’t have been more than five years old. I asked him if he had ever been on a Ferris wheel before.
“Yeah,” he said, “But it was a lot bigger than this one.” I couldn’t let on that even a step-ladder made me dizzy, so I nodded. In my mind I had already started writing a farewell note to my mother. Then we got stuck at the top. During the longest 18 seconds of my life, I could feel my earlier blood pressure score becoming irrelevant. I really needed to hug a giant banana.
At that exact moment, Luke had the nerve to yawn and say, “This is boring.” I thought, “here I am — a 41-year-old basket case, and little Luke was already a jaded thrill-seeker at age five. He wasn’t the only one, either. Earlier, I had seen a child sound asleep in a ride called the Spinning Tubs of Fun. I wondered what it took to impress children these days.
When the ride was over, Luke waved goodbye and disappeared into the Monkey Maze. I, on the other hand, wobbled back to the petting zoo to chill with the antelopes. As I nearly passed out in front of an impala, all I could think was, “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.”
