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2002-06-12 - 6:16 a.m.

One evening last summer I decided to take a trip back in time and went to the county fair, a place I hadn’t visited in 40 years.

A pungent stew of smells assaulted me as I handed over my money and held my hand out for the stamp giving me license to pass through the gates. Buttery popcorn mingled with greasy fried sausage, sugary funnel cakes and a barnyard. Frenzied music blasted my eardrums and neon flashes bathed the humid August night in Day-Glo colors.

Several dozen people streamed through the gate, carrying me along, down the white gravel path and over electrical cables snaking across the midway like fat vipers. Once inside, I untangled myself from the crowd, stumbled several yards off the path and stared--dumbfounded--at the strange sights surrounding me. My passage into this garish world had abruptly yanked me away from the fairs of my youth when I tagged along with my hand clamped tightly in Dad’s hand and bounced with excitement fed by the sights and smells. This was Atlantic City festering in a cow pasture. Or maybe something out of A Clock Work Orange. It was not a return to the hard packed path of carnie barkers, Bean Bag Toss, bearded ladies, sticky twists of pink and blue cotton candy, and worn rides of the 60s.

That’s the last time I laid down a nickel to toss the rings for the toy gun (none of those silly little Kewpie dolls for me, thanks), plunked a dime down at the little booth to have my liver dislocated on the Tilt-A-Whirl or waited on the edge of my seat for the alligator boy to slither across the plank stage in the Believe It Or Not tent.

The flashing neon punctuated the sky and the music ricocheted inside my head, dragging me away from a secure memory and into a strange and confusing place. I choked back my panic and slowly entered the bowels of the monster throbbing before me. To ease my fear I went in search of comfort: the Ferris Wheel, Tea Cups, Octopus, Ponie Rides, and my favorite years ago, the Merry Go Round with its circle of gilded horses. At least on that horse I didn’t feel like I’d been tossed in a blender and forgotten.

When I pressed through the jostling knot of people and finally stood beneath the Ferris Wheel I felt a reconnection to a familiar and safer world. When I closed my eyes I was a little girl again, feeling the comfort of Dad’s calloused hand wrapped around my tiny hand, sensing his strength, knowing he held the burden of my responsibilities and worries in his hands. The glare of screaming neon and ear-splitting music, the bitter reality of a forty-year evolution of life--youth gone astray and innocent dreams wasted--were replaced by a less complicated and more protected time.

Opening my eyes spoiled the sanctuary of my earlier memory.

Spread around me and across the midway were strange contraptions resembling alien spacecraft, promising bruised kidney’s and cardiac problems, and touching a private terror. The Centrox, Breakdance, Alibaba, Galactica. The Kamikaze and The Zipper, which looked a lot like the business end of a chain saw. The Gravitron and The Scrambler, up-ending bodies and cracking-the-whip, although cracking the neck now seemed a more accurate description. Definitely not for the timid or weak of stomach.

I stood under the awning of a psychedelic pretzel stand and watched young people in baggy clothing and pierced and painted bodies board the dark rides, those little electric cars that bang through double doors into adventure. The terrors lingering in the darkness used to be cheap mannequins activated by trip switches. God knows what Generation X technology powers those aberrations today. But the dark rides aren’t about what’s in the inky tunnel, it’s about what’s inside your head. And what was going on inside my head was a longing for the simplicity of the county fairs of my youth, and an overwhelming desire to be a young girl tucked safely under Dad’s muscled arm. I left the shining, noisy pretzel wagon and fled through the crowd in search of a small plank-board stage or the shelter of a steamy livestock barn.

As a kid my time was spent in sagging, steamy livestock barns, smelling ripe manure and the sweet aroma of hay. If I could pet all the horses and cows and hogs and sheep I wanted I was happy (Dad was too; this was a lot cheaper than the body bruisers on the midway!).

But I was happiest on the small plank-board stage showing my dog Harriet. The opening Saturday at the fair always featured the dog show. Not the fancy Westchester kind dominated by the American Kennel Club, but our own small town kind featuring mutts like my Harriet. Oh, sure, we had entries for best of breed, but my dog was a mutt, so she entered the Best Dressed Dog contest.

Poor dog.

She was bathed and brushed every day for a week leading up to her one golden moment on stage. Then early on the Saturday of the show, Mom would load us up. Us being all the kids in the neighborhood taking our prize dogs to the fair. SaraBelle Winslow and Lucy--Lucy was a tiny toy terrier--and KooBird Bloskowich and her collie Addie (Addie being short of Admiral something-or-other). Lucy and Harriet traveled in their costumes; Addie, being the regal gent he was, entered the best of breed (and usually won it) and went sans clothes. Mom and Harriet and me in front, SaraBelle and Lucy and KooBird and Addie in back.

We all three carried our show necessities in respective containers. KooBird had Addie’s grooming tools in her Mighty Mouse lunch box. I had Harriet's brush and my comb (which I would haul out and tug through Harriet’ s long, fanning tail--much to Mom’s horror) in a cigar box tied with string. Since Lucy really didn’t have much hair, SaraBelle tucked a frilly little doll in her white patent leather purse.

My fondest memory of the fair is when Harriet won first in Best Dressed. She went as Kate Smith (all frilled out in a dress my grandmother made for her). We were center stage and I looked down and told Harriet to sing (Smith was quite a singer in the 50s). Harriet sat down, extended her graceful red neck and pointed her long, slender nose skyward. And howled and howled and howled. God, how I loved that dog!

One of my proudest moments was getting to go back up on stage with Harriet and collect her little gold plastic doggy Oscar! And the ride home was great. We all got cotton candy. I shared mine with Harriet (more horror for Mom), since she was, after all, the prize winner.

The garish new millennium fair was a harsh contrast to my memories. I trudged through the pulsing midway, listening to the screams coming from the spacecraft hovering in the electric sky above me, and sidestepped people chewing meat from sticks. I never found the small plank-board stage hosting a dog show. I did thread my way through the surreal, air conditioned animal barns, and I did pet the animals. And I bought a pink and blue twist of cotton candy. On the ride home the candy melted into a lump of syrup in my mouth. The lump in my heart wasn’t so easy to ignore. I had stepped into a Carnival House of Mirrors and glimpsed a painful image, and I knew no matter how hard I tried to massage it I would never be able to shape the image back to the way it had once been.

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