Summer isn’t really<\/i> over, but last night was the final day of the Dallastown carnival. The kids start school next week.<\/p>\n
I walked up to Dallastown a few nights ago. I needed the exercise; I’ve been lax, I thought my legs would hate me, but they didn’t. I saw deer on Oak Road as I went.<\/p>\n
The carnival was every bit as unimpressive as its been in years past. I’m not being cynical about it. It’s just not my thing. I’m not going to ride the rides. There are some booths, and none ever catch my interest. (The York County Republican Party didn’t even have a booth this year.) There are food trucks, which I never want to navigate. There’s a band, which I never listen to.<\/p>\n
There was a new ride, a ring-like roller coaster.<\/p>\n
The carnival made me strangely glum this year.<\/p>\n
Last year, for no reason I ever understood, my mom began asking me about “the town carnival” in early June. Every phone call, she would ask me when the carnival was, if the carnival was the next week, if I was planning to go.<\/p>\n
Every conversation I would say, “No, it’s not until August. It’s the week before the kids go back to school.”<\/p>\n
She was strangely fixated on the carnival.<\/p>\n
I went. I stayed for less than ten minutes<\/a>. I don’t know that I ever talked with her about it after. There wasn’t anything to say. It was every bit as underwhelming as it had always been.<\/p>\n I think — and don’t quote me on this — that she was thinking back to her own Maryland childhood in the 1950s. Town fairs were a big deal. When I went to the Mid-Maryland Celtic Festival, she knew the fairground in Mt. Airy where it was held, because she had gone to fairs there. Town fairs were something she grew up with.<\/p>\n They weren’t something I grew up with. There was the County Fair when I was in elementary school, and we would go and not really do anything that I can recall. There was livestock, which didn’t interest me greatly; we weren’t farmers.<\/p>\n Our experiences were different. A town fair had a nostalgic pull for her. A town fair has none for me.<\/p>\n This year, she couldn’t ask me when the fair was. She couldn’t ask me if I were going. She couldn’t ask what I saw there.<\/p>\n As historically unimpressive the Dallastown Carnival has been for me, as cynical as I could be about it, I wish she could have asked me about it.<\/p>\n Grief is weird and unexpected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Summer isn’t really over, but last night was the final day of the Dallastown carnival. The kids start school next week. I walked up to Dallastown a few nights ago. I needed the exercise; I’ve been lax, I thought my legs would hate me, but they didn’t. I saw deer on Oak Road as IContinue reading “Summer’s End”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[3968,5353],"class_list":["post-35472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-dallastown","tag-leona-gibson","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}