Topsfield Fair...

Took the family to Topsfield Fair yesterday. It's an annual tradition replete with sitting in traffic, paying an exhorbitant amount of money to park in a field, and having large quantities of cotton candy and powdered sugar stuck to our shoes.

But we have fun.

My parents never took me to the Fair. If I were a betting man, I'd say growing up on a working farm probably took all the charm and attraction out of paying good money to go gawk at livestock. When you spent a good chunk of your formative years feeding, milking, and herding cows, paying $8 so your kid can stare in slack-jawed splendor probably makes about as much sense as voting for Obama.

I kid, I kid...

I think, in some small way, going to the Fair is my way of atoning for living an admittedly surbubanite existence. My family, my ancestors, were farmers going back through the ages; my grandparents bought a large chunk of acreage "out in the sticks" when they arrived in America as a way of continuing their farming tradition. The Great Depression, WWII, and the Baby Boom of the 1950s and 60s turned the bucolic farming community into a bustling suburb; the sylvan lifestyle usurped by cookie-cutter houses and interstate 495. The farms of my childhood, gave way to shopping malls, with apologies to Chrissie Hynde.

So I bring the kids to the Fair every year. For one day out of the year, they can bounce around on real honest-to-goodness tractors; they can watch draft horses pulling wagons; they can walk through the petting farm and pet the goats and sheep. They can eat fried dough and cheese-fries by the bucketload; they can watch jugglers and magicians and troubadours to their hearts' content. We ooh and ahh over the cute bunnies; marvel at the sheer tonnage of the pigs; wander through the colors and scents of the floral exhibits; and take in the sights, sounds, and smells of the County Fair.

For my $22, it's a trip back in time. It harkens to an earlier time, when the Fair would often be the event of the year; people gathering to judge produce and award ribbons for largest, best-in-class, etc. Kids get to watch bees buzz around in the plexiglass hives; they get to watch a cow getting milked; they see police dogs put through their paces. It's all here. For one day out of the year, we can live a scene or two from Charlotte's Web, where we all go to the Fair.

And FWIW, the kids both went right to bed without fuss last night. That alone is worth the price of the ticket...

That is all.