Indeed, we are, and I do.

Daddy took me to my first fair when I was eight years old – a surprising turn of events considering his rigid view on life. Any man that didn’t want his daughter to sing the music from The Lawrence Welk Show because it was too worldly hardly seems a likely candidate to take that same child to a fair, yet he did. The result is my deep love of all things carnival.

I love to watch people and see new inventions. My friend Bouger is a fellow people watcher, and oh, the sights we see.

Green hair, blue hair, no hair – we see it all. And where are the teeth? What did these folks do with them? What about hygiene and manners?

“Where’d he come from?” Bouger asks me.

“I have no idea,” I answer, shaking my head in disbelief, “but maybe he’ll go on back there before long. Clearly, none of these people have mirrors.”

Now you know the very people of whom I speak. Usually they’re wearing messy knit shirts that they should’ve thrown away quite a while back, they don’t seem to have access to soap and water and their language can turn the air blue.

“Either get it or move on,” we hear at a food stand.

The vendor looks tired. A couple moves on – the woman looking disappointed and the man looking surly. We can’t hear her, but we have no doubt that the man will for quite some time to come.

I’m not one for the latest deep fried cow paddy or whatever else someone may want to inflict on the world, but many people certainly are. A lot of folks will try anything. A few stick to the more standard fare with the vengeance of a famished horde of locusts.

Some of those people go through sandwiches like buzz saws. We see it at every fair, don’t we? One hand presses a London broil against a gaping hole, far too big to be a mouth, in a guy’s face while the sandwich disappears at an alarming rate, and up comes the other hand with a funnel cake. An exhausted carny takes a brief break to eat.

Bouger and I stand and watch the lights at the different businesses on the lot and see the interchangeable faces. Even then, the faces belong to groups. Some are worn, some exhausted, some smiling through nearly all of their teeth, some young, some old, some dirty and some clean.

“I’d better get on back,” says Bouger.

“Yeah, me, too,” I answer. “See you when I get off.”

I head back to the taffy joint to hear yet another idiot who thinks he’s cute ask for anus while pointing to anise.

Bouger goes back to hear, “Hey, do y’all sell t-shirts?” Never mind the sign that says Sal’s T-Shirts. I’d say it the way Mr. No Teeth and Nasty said it, but I can’t type that way.

Still, we’ll help the oddballs that are a slice of fair-going history, and they’ll think we’re strange. Remember, they don’t have mirrors.