Folks At The Fair

Miss Bit and myself were eager to attend the holiday folk fair Sunday after church. T. Bone...hmmm not so much. You see he was missing his Packers who were playing while we wanted him to wander around with us girls. The nerve! Adding insult to injury was the fact that I insisted he keep on his church clothes for the occasion. One would have thought he was being asked to wear a three piece suit instead of the jeans and a button down he had on. Needless to say, he never took off his Badger fleece and didn't find it amusing when I joked that he could be costume-clad and ready to perform like so many other boys in attendance.

As we made our way to the entrance, a taxi dropped off an older gentleman who was, indeed, rather dressed up for the event. Hearing our chatter, he called out to us to inquire if he was near the door seeing as how he couldn't see. He was blind. We helped guide him to the entrance, which was still at a distance and all wondered how he would manage to get around an unfamiliar venue crowded with people and booths. Both T. Bone and Miss Bit piped up that they thought we should "help" our new friend by taking him around the fair. The earnestness in their eyes prompted me to pause for a moment. They wanted nothing more than to show kindness to a stranger in need. My beneficence was further from the surface. Come to think of it I was more worried about offending him in some way and that made me uncomfortable. We were all saved from our consciences when another man (friend? guide?) offered him an arm and off they went.

Off we went as well. Our first stop was to sign up for a raffle where we were harassed by a cantankerous booth attendee. I think his badgering was in good fun, but it was a little off-putting. He asked T. Bone who Hitler was, and was surprised...perhaps even impressed when he knew. That was our golden ticket into the fair. According to him, 90 some odd percent of youth ages 10-18 don't have a clue who Hitler was. He claimed that the most frequently given answer is that he is a rock star. If that's true, it's truly sad.

The very next booth we came upon displayed rocks from all over the world, and the first rock we looked at was from a small village in Denmark. This little village just happened to be the setting for the work of literary fiction T. Bone just finished reading about the Nazis. It was creepy in a cool, uncanny way.

To say the least, it was a connect the dots afternoon of very few degrees of separation and I came home feeling certain of what I already know to be true. Clearly, we are connected by fewer links than we think. Six degrees seems like far too many at times. And what difference does the number make at the end of the day because on some level we can all relate in one way or another? That blind man is some one's son. The abrasive volunteer is some one's brother. The maker of Polish floral wreaths is some one's grandmother.

The persistent Russian who claimed my aunt was the doppelganger of his erstwhile classmate still living in his homeland happened to be a relative of one of Miss Bit's classmates. The patient Japanese woman who helped my son pick out an origami boat used to set-up a step for me at the Y. My daughter's Filipino Sunday school teacher was on the lookout for the Danish booth where she hoped to get the same open faced lobster sandwich she enjoyed last year, but she stopped long enough to greet Miss Bit.

I'm not going all kumbaya here, but it just strikes me how we are more alike than we often think and how we all want the same thing: to feel a part of something bigger... a family, a team, a community. But...BUT we are often reluctant to reach out and make connections for the fear of offending or worse yet, being offended. Offended by rejection. At the end of the day, we all just want to count...to matter...to feel good about our daily contributions.

So there you have it. The folk fair proved to be fun and tasty and a little bit frustrating if...IF you were T. Bone. We ran into a friend of my aunt's who updated us on the score of the game he was reluctantly DVRing so he could be part of our family for the afternoon. She casually said it. He promptly cried. I brightly blushed. She sweated the small stuff. I threatened to accidentally hit delete. He soon shaped up. And now...NOW I have a darn good story to tell to my grandkids one day. And who knows...he may end up marrying her daughter far away in the future and we'll all laugh together at the uncanny coincidence of how we first met. Stranger things have and will happen.