Our Family's 65-Year-Old Tradition

We’re entering into fair season, and I was trying to figure out how to give some of you who are new here a feel for what these five weeks in August and September are like for my family, these weeks when we run concessions stands at two fairs (The Maryland State Fair and the Great Frederick Fair). The following is a piece I wrote for the book Ordinary Saints, a wonderful compilation of essays published by Square Halo Books. I hope this gives you a glimpse into our world. And go buy the book—it’s really marvelous, and includes pieces by Lucy Shaw, Byron Borger, Christie Purifoy, Malcolm Guite, and a host of other wonderful writers.

4 Years Old - 1981

10 p.m. on a Friday night at the Frederick Fair in Maryland and I’m lying on a homemade bed of boxes and lawn chairs under one of the counters, wrapped in a sleeping bag, fighting to stay awake. All around our massive tent I can hear the night-time sounds of the fair, where my family gathers for ten days every year to run a large concession stand.

My grandfather shouts out to the passing crowds, “Get your ham and cheese sandwiches!” The guy in the small tent beside ours, selling his wares, “Now, step right over here, sir. You won’t find prices like these anywhere else…” The tractors in the tractor pull grind their way along the grandstand. The distant laughing-screams of people sound out from the rides I’m too scared to even watch.

“You okay?” my mom asks, squatting down and checking on me. She tucks the sleeping bag in around me. She wears a white apron on which clings small bits of ham and Swiss cheese. “We’re going to start cleaning up soon. Then we’ll head back to the motel.”

I nod, my eyes heavy. Surrounded by my family and my parents’ friends, the noises of the fair pressing up against the tent, I fall asleep.

8 years old - 1985

Inside the fairground gates, I run ahead of my mom, duck down the secret passageway between a row of campers, and sneak into the back of my grandfather’s tent. The smell of funnel cake and caramel apples and popcorn chase me, friendly ghosts.

“Hey!” I shout, and it seems like everyone erupts with joyful shouts, as if they haven’t seen me in years.

My dad is already there, running ham and cheese over a big slicer (one year, when I am older, my aunt nearly cuts her finger off on the spinning blade). I hug my dad and slide down the narrow aisles strewn with extension cords and empty cardboard boxes.

“Hey, grandpa!” I say, and my grandpa looks at me, pretends not to recognize me.

“Who’s this?” he asks in a gruff voice, his jowls growling, his eyes glittering.

“Grandpa!” I complain. “It’s me!”

“Oh, yes, you,” he says with a smile. He looks around, trying to be sneaky, then he holds out his hand. I play along, reaching. My grandfather hands me a $10 bill, an extravagant gift to an 8-year-old in 1985.

There is a large spinning wheel at a stand across from ours. It costs one dollar to play. If you win, you get a bag of Snickers. I win a lot – suspiciously so. The carnival worker must be stopping the wheel on the winner’s spot with his foot. I walk back to my grandfather’s tent, loaded down with bags and bags of candy bars. I dole them out to my cousins like newly-minted million-dollar bills.

Country music blares from the old speakers. I crawl under one of the tables, pile up three or four broken down cardboard boxes, and spread a sleeping bag there, in the dark corner. I crawl inside, tasting its warmth, my belly full of treats. I can hear my family working around me, shouting out orders, laughing with their customers.

The cool autumn air has turned chilly – it blows in under the table, and I give in to sleep, dreaming of tilt-a-whirls and cotton candy and the day when I’ll be old enough to work in that tent for Grandpa.

14 Years Old - 1991

It is the first year of the fair after Grandpa died, and we keep finding things that remind us of him: the old tables he built by hand; the note written in permanent marker on the outside of the meat case in his scrawled handwriting; the wide broom he’d used for at least 20 years, practically worn down to the nub. My mom sighs a lot while she works. My dad finds another relic of Grandpa’s and clears his throat loudly, walks away.

I am old enough to handroll soft pretzels for the duration of a 12-hour shift, and I spend my days at the fair cutting off narrow strips of dough, rolling them out, and twisting them in the air and then placing the pretzels on a tray and in the oven. The children stop and watch. Hundreds and hundreds of pretzels a day. Over and over again. I roll until my shoulders ache and my wrists are sore.

I remember Grandpa that year with nearly every pretzel I roll. How can someone be gone and also present? Away but also home?

I take a break at the end of the day. A cool autumn breeze blows through and the tent inhales, exhales. The sides billow out and then pull in. It is not the same place without his weathered grin, but it is also not less than it was before—it is somehow more.

21 Years Old – 1998

There is a new couple who run the kettle corn stand across the way from our tent, and we get to know them. She is lively and smiling and bright, flashing eyes. He is gruff and quiet and pushes his hand truck through the crowd with a certain kind of simmering at the world around him. I am not sure how to talk to him.

A year passes, then two, and we become friends with the kettle corn couple. Jim and Suzy. They meet my wife Maile, get to know our kids when we come together for that one week every year. They remark on how much they’ve grown.

One year while I’m rolling pretzels Jim slides over and we start talking. He tells me about his daughter, how she was murdered by her husband, how it darkened his life. I ask him a few questions. He answers quietly. When he walks away, I realize I didn’t know him until that moment.

35 Years Old - 2012

If my grandfather was still alive, he would wear black shoes like that, and an old black belt like that one, and probably even sport those grayish, navy-blue trousers.

“Hey,” I shout to the man outside the tent. “You need a drink?” I keep rolling soft pretzels.

He smiles, and I don’t see many teeth in there. He walks slowly toward our tent, as if each foot weighs about fifty pounds. The wrinkles around his eyes are deep, eroded streams feeding the Grand Canyon.

“I remember your grandpa,” he says with that toothless grin. “He was a firecracker.”

I laugh and roll another pretzel.

“Where’s your old man?” he asks me, smiling.

“My dad? He’s a preacher. He’s at home today, at church, but he’ll be here tomorrow.”

The old man’s eyes glaze over and I can tell he’s somewhere else, somewhere besides these fairgrounds.

“You go to church?” I ask.

“Nah. Well, I did when I was a kid, every Sunday. My parents made me go. Then I joined the Army and spent 18 months in Korea.”

He has forgotten I am there.

“When I got back from the Army I went back to church, and I gave the pastor money, you know, to fix some ceilings and stuff. Then we walked outside and I put my hand on his shoulder like this -” he puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes my collar bone – “and I told him, ‘You don’t know nothin’. I just saw my friends get blown apart. Who took care of me over in Korea? Not the church. Not God. It was my buddies. We took care of each other.’ That’s what I told him.”

He kept talking. Fourteen years he’s been around The Great Frederick Fair and I’ve never spoken to him for more than two minutes. Now he can’t stop.

“You know what? I kept going to church. Then my old man died. The pastor stood up there at his funeral and he kept talking about how great my dad was, how he was in heaven this and heaven that. But I knew different. I knew he stole stuff – if he was here he’d steal these pies when you weren’t looking! My old man did stuff. And that preacher just stood up there and talked nonsense. I walked up to the front of the church and said, ‘If my dad didn’t go to hell, then I don’t want any part of this.'”

He looked back at me. I handed him a bottle of Coke. He looked at it like I was handing him a foreign language.

“The cops came and kicked me out. I never went back to church after that,” he said. “Them preachers don’t know nothin’.”

42 Years Old – 2019

By now I’ve been coming to the fair for over four decades. Grandma and Grandpa are gone. I run the stand with my parents, my wife, my own children, nieces and nephews, my sisters and their families. I look around at all the young employees and realize I’m one of the older ones now.

And I’m still rolling pretzels. Slice the dough, stretch it out, flip it around, lay it on the tray, bake it for five minutes. Over and over again, thousands of times in a week.

But it was never about the pretzels. Was it? It was about Jim and Suzy and Chuck and Jackie and John who thought preachers didn’t know nothin’. It was about these weeks spent together over the forty years and getting to know people by increment.

Poppy? Where is our youngest daughter, Poppy?

I roll out the last dough of the night, put the last tray of pretzels in the oven, and wash my hands before making the rounds. It’s my responsibility now to collect the money from the registers, put down the tent flaps at the end of the day, make sure the ovens are turned off. Our friends and employees laugh and joke with each other as they clean—it is always a relief when another day is done.

Most nights, my dad isn’t at the fair anymore. He makes a few trips down every week, bringing supplies and giving our employees a ride back and forth. My mom still makes sandwiches, just like my grandma used to, standing at one of the large tables my grandpa built, methodically adding ham and cheese to the soft rolls.

I check at the table in the back, the one covered with crayons and paper, but Poppy’s not there. I ask my sister if she’s seen her. She shakes her head. I go behind the trailer, back where we’ve arranged some metal shelves to create a private room of sorts, and there she is, asleep on a lawn chair, a blanket up to her chin, a cool September breeze pressing the canvas tent in and out. I bend in close and push her hair out of her eyes, tuck the blanket in around her. 

Another autumn.