That’s me at the Pennsylvania Farm Show last week in Harrisburg doing a woman-and-goat-and-baby version of Picasso’s famous Man-With-a-Lamb sculpture. I love that there’s a road somewhere in Pennsylvania called Lick Run. I’m not sure that I love that I’ve become the kind of person who pays to get pictures taken of her with her human baby and a baby goat. I refuse to admit I also got the same picture put on a tee-shirt. Anyway, that’s Maisie the day before her first birthday in her Baby Loves Disco legwarmers. She does not in fact have a cataract on her left eye; the guy who took the picture simply didn’t fix her red-eye right, despite his perfectly functional digital camera and computer. Good old American don’t-know-how but charge you for it anyway.
This is the kind of blog post in which I try to make everything I mention into a symptom of something called America.
I don’t really live in Pennsylvania, I live in Philadelphia, the difference being Philadelphia is part of the northeastern United States, and has a comparatively (which is not to say perfectly) healthy relationship with both irony and diversity, while the rest of PA is very beautiful, and, until you get to Pittsburgh, deep bible belt. There are “REPENT” billboards along the PA Turnpike, as well as signs saying “Juvenile Detention Centers of PA: Keeping Our Communities Safe.” Those rotten kids, lock them up. However, the Farm Show is lots of fun; this is the second time I’ve been and the first time with a kid. Maisie loved the baby chicks quivering and fluffing in the incubator, the duckling swim ‘n’ slide show, the rows and rows of farting cows, the exotic bunnies with lop ears and velvety fur, and she especially loved the 9-year-old stag with the giant rack from the deer farm an hour north of H’burg. She grabbed his antlers and squealed with delight. When he stuck out his tongue and flopped it across his lips, though, she shuddered into Jim, who was holding her, and hid her face. Enough’s enough! The butter sculpture wasn’t as big or elaborate as last time. Last time, it was a whole harvest spread with an old-timey farm family and baskets of fruit and veggies, and, if I recall correctly, a butter cat licking up spilled milk made out of butter. This time it seemed to involved a smallish schoolbus. Still, a butter sculpture is a butter sculpture, same as a sand sculpture is a sand sculpture, only more so.
We skipped the rodeo. Jim pointed out that they make the broncos buck by vise-ing their balls, and didn’t I think this was rather unkind. I did. Women walked around in the most fantastic square dance costumes: Knee-length skirts, often patterned like a Holstein cowhide, that stuck straight out sideways over layers and layers of starchy petticoats. We planned to see the evening square dance parade but were too tired to drive back from our grimy Howard Johnson Hotel, alas. That’s life with a one-year-old. I’ve become the kind of person who says things like “that’s life with a one-year-old.”
It was hard to get around with a stroller: There were massive crowds of, well, massive people. You know that Mark Yakich book of poems, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross? The title has been occurring to me at different moments lately. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Piss. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting for their Dogs to Piss. The biggest surges at the Farm Show were in the direction of the food court. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Eat.
We sat at big round tables, and other people we didn’t know sat there too. Maisie was a cutie waving at everybody but they didn’t notice or if they did they didn’t wave back. I’ve become one of those people who thinks anyone who doesn’t pay attention to her baby must have something wrong with them, but there it is. (For all Americans’ sentimentality about fetuses, I don’t think many of them really like babies much, not compared to, say, Italians in Rome this past fall, where people would pounce on Maisie and grab her away from us and play with her and babble praise at her so often it was hard for us to get down the street. But that’s another post for another time.) Anyway, at the Farm Show, Jim and I ate some pretty good lamb stew and eavesdropped on conversations. I got a green dress for Jackie’s wedding but then Jackie said I couldn’t wear green so I got another dress but it was okay because I figured I would wear it to the inauguration after all green seemed appropriate as a symbol but then I couldn’t because I had gained too much weight by then but that was okay because…
I was going to ask whose inauguration, but didn’t see an opening to get a word in edgewise. The thing about Americans is they are sometimes very goodhearted. They are nice people. Everything needs to be okay. Everything is okay. It was okay. It was okay I couldn’t wear the green dress because Jackie was being a bitch. It was okay that I couldn’t wear the dress to the inauguration. It was okay. It was okay. It was okay.
Hi Daisy,
Greetings, and boy, do I miss those REPENT signs. That’s as American as square dances.
Maisie looks great!
Dear Daisy,
Thanks for the rural reportage. Unfortunately this photograph reminded me instantly of the scene in Crusoe in England:
[...]
I got so tired of the very colors!
One day I dyed a baby goat bright red
with my red berries, just to see
something a little different.
And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.
Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food
and love, but they were pleasant rather
than otherwise. But then I’d dream of things
like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. [...]
Ugh!
Some of my best memories as a kid are of going to the Kentucky State Fair–I especially remember some beautiful mules. Who knew mules could be beautiful?
I know what you mean I think about Americans and babies… Greece in some ways is very un-child friendly (everyone smokes, for instance), but Greeks love kids and children are welcome pretty much anywhere at any time. In America, we feel self-conscious when we drag Jason along with us, since apparently the generations aren’t supposed to mix in public unless it is a designated “family” event/space.
Vivek–Thanks for the Bishop lines. A friend of mine told me that when he and his wife were expecting, the best advice they got was: “Here’s what you have to remember. You’re going to want to eat your baby. They look so delicious, you’ll want to bite right in. Don’t do it. Don’t eat your baby.” Goat is quite delicious too.
Alicia–I remember riding on buses in Greece in the early 90s with “Smoking Forbidden” signs and everyone puffing away, including the busdriver.
Major–Don’t you think if they made those REPENT signs read, instead, REGRET, they’d reach more people? That could be the basis for an entirely new religion. Oh wait, that religion already exists; it’s called Poetry.
Cheers,
Daisy
Babies just aren’t that interesting unless you’re obligated to like them because of familial ties or some such.