:: Friday 31 August 01
I've been sitting out on my back deck, in my canvas chair, sipping cognac and listening to the crickets and looking at the full moon. (My spider has disappeared--she probably took off in a huff for less crowded locales, where she doesn't have dumbass people lumbering into her web all the time.) The air is mild and soft and richly redolent of humus, the smell of a summer's worth of lush green growth just starting to topple over into decay and death.
Summer is right at its ripest, and about to be cut down. By the time the next full moon rolls around, it'll probably be too chilly to sit out there in a t-shirt and sandals. It seems like just weeks ago that I was gloating in this space about celebrating the annual vernal rituals--First Bike Ride of Spring, First Day Outside With No Jacket. Since then I've whizzed past the mileage markers of summer: the Heart of the Beast Mayday Parade; the Memorial Day Family Get-Together and Ritual Charring of Animal Flesh; the Pride festival; the 4th of July parade back in my old home neighborhood; le Grand Aioli Bastille Day fest, which marks the midpoint of summer; the swampy interlude of suffocatingly hot days; and now the arrival of the State Fair, the time-honored, offical, ceremonial marker of the end of summer.
The Minnesota State Fair, which is huge, is held right in the Twin Cities, and I grew up a short walk from the fairgrounds, so it was a big presence in my life as a child. The fair always ends on Labor Day, and school always started the day after, so for all the delicious pleasures of the fair, it was also an occasion of terrible premonitory grief. (I don't know that I've ever in my life since felt the kind of misery I used to feel as a child, when school rolled around again. Lord Jesus, I hated school.)
The timing of it is so perfect--all the pleasures of summer, the anarchic freedom and the lush heat and the thronging crowds and the bad-for-you greasy food and the rides and the animals and the sideshows and the noise and the liberty of it all, all packed into one gigantic saturnalia, and then--wham, the sun comes up the day after Labor Day, September is here, and the big orange buses roll up to the curb and cart us all off to the grey prison of the schoolroom, for another nine months.
I love September now, and the feeling of the seasons shifting, summer ending, winter looming. (I love it so much that, I suddenly realize, I wrote a whole story essentially about that feeling. Heh.) As difficult as it was for me to deal with it in my childhood, I have no doubt that the experience of reveling in the fair while at the same time grieving its end gave me a lifelong taste for those moments when, in the midst of pleasure, you can already sense its ending. The whiff of decay underlying the glorious aromatic live ripeness of the tomato patch. The skull beneath even the loveliest skin.
So I'll head out to the fair sometime this weekend, hoist a beer and
eat a celebratory bag of deep-fried cheese curds in honor of summer, maybe
haul my camera along and get some pictures of the whole thing to put up
here. Because, all the Deep Thoughts aside, the fair is a total hoot,
and I'm too old to not have a thoroughly good time while it's there to
be had. Winter is coming right up, after all.
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Recipe for State Fair Corn Dogs
"I'd learned on the highway and in the circus, in the army, and at boxing gyms that even if you have a cutman in your corner to stanch the blood, it doesn't obviate the need for stamina, self-reliance, and keeping oriented to what I think of as the earth's magnetic field. You can have allies, mentors, be married, but still you're going to be alone most of your life, and if you're going to run off the rails, you had better be good company for yourself."
--Edward Hoagland