When You Forget What Someone Looks Like
And how things are always changing
The hotel room is quiet, the white line of sunlight that had split the heavy curtains only a few minutes ago has faded, and the a/c unit is purring away. Saving Private Ryan is on the television, muted. The best thing right now would be for me to close my eyes and get some rest, yet here I am. The light from the lamp in the corner is dim and yellow and lazy.
For us, this is the Wednesday between the two fairs. We’ve moved all of our equipment and paper goods—ovens and cups and lids and napkins and tables and lemonade machines and more tables and every other thing you can imagine—from the Maryland State Fair to The Great Frederick Fair via a 22-foot trailer and lots of grunt work. Thursday we finish setting up, Friday morning we do a test run, and by Friday afternoon we’ll begin making sandwiches and soft pretzels for nine days straight, something I’ve done during this third week in September since I was a kid.
My family has had a concession stand at the Frederick Fair for the last 65 years. It’s a long story. And this is the first year of my entire life, or at least that I can remember, that my dad wasn’t here for the first day of setup. He and my mom have passed the responsibility of running the stand on to Maile and me.
He probably should have come along, though—he was texting and calling every five minutes with “make sure you do this” and “have you thought about this” and “how is everything going?”
“Did you get the trailer backed in under the tent?”
“Don’t forget to plug in the refrigerated case.”
“The drain line is in a container somewhere.”
I’ve said it here a million times before, and I’ll probably say it another million: time is a strange thing. I still remember coming here as a kid with my dad to set up, joined by one of my uncles. I remember late dinners at Bob Evans after a long day, laughing and having fun. My dad was always his silliest on those nights, after long days of hard work getting the stand ready.
And now I know why—what an immense relief it is to be at this point, with all the equipment unloaded and under the tent, and a long stretch of beautiful weather in the forecast.
I remember going back to the hotel room with my dad and uncle, back in the day, feeling like I was really growing up because I had helped. Then there was the waking up early the next morning and going back to the fair, drowsy, muscles aching.
My dad and my uncle seemed old at the time, but they were probably the age I am now. Now, my uncle is well into his 70s. This year my nephew Jude came with me—he’s 20, and, at 46, I’m the old guy.
Time is a strange thing.
As you may know, our oldest two kids are off to college this year. Our daughter Lucy is a freshman, and the other day our youngest daughter Poppy looked up with a serious face, very little emotion, and said quietly, “Sometimes I forget what Lucy looks like, so I go into her bedroom and look at the pictures of her on the wall.”
Well.
We do, though. We forget. I forget what my uncle looked like back then and how young my dad was. I forget what my grandma looked like when she was only fifty and making sandwiches at the fair.
But some things remain: I remember the smell of the fair on a cold autumn night (think cotton candy and candy apples and pretzels in the oven); I remember the sound of the fair (think teenagers screaming on rides and tractor pulls and demolition derbies); I remember sunsets behind the Ferris wheel and the dust rising from the sulky races.
Time is a strange thing, full of forgetting and remembering.
Our longtime friend Chuck who runs concessions in the tent next to ours came flying into our tent today with a big grin on his face. We’ve known him for probably 30 years, watched his kids grow up in annual increments, and greeting him each year is a kind of reunion.
“Where’s the other guy at?” he asked loudly, boisterous, grinning. He meant my dad.
“Dad didn’t come this year,” I said, smiling quietly, shrugging. “He’ll be here tomorrow though.”
Chuck’s face went blank—I could tell he was shocked, maybe even a little sad—but he recovered quickly. He stuck his hand out. I shook it.
He nodded at me, and it felt like the passing of the torch in some kind of small way.
“Well, it’s good to see you. You ready for the fair?”
Love these stories and so true that we forget and remember the strangest things sometimes!
I love these stories of your family and the fairs. My dad supervised the concessions and carnival at our local county fair when I was a teenager and I pretty much lived at our fairgrounds for a couple of weeks each summer--helping him, selling ice to the concession stands, and taking tickets at grandstand events. The smell of corndogs, lemon shakeups, and cotton candy never fail to transport me back to those hot, noisy, hard, happy days.