This was a bit shocking. It was our fourth year doing the county fair—an exhilarating, exhausting several-day event that both of my kids normally looked forward to for months. But one thing was different this year: My son was 15. He’d been slouching around the fairground in aviator sunglasses, scowling and sighing, and was even sent out of one competition to change out of flip-flops into proper footwear. And now he’d won an entire division. Specifically, the Pack Goat division—whereby he had to lead his pet goat over bridges, through tunnels and puddles, and around tubs of foliage.
His follow-up text was even more shocking.
“Now I have to do Master Showman.”
Even in the best of his adolescent years, when he still loved the fair, competing in Master Showman—in which the winners from each division compete in a final ultimate event—would have been unnerving. And for me, a transplant from the city still barely managing to navigate the entirely foreign culture of the county fair, the thought of my son competing in this ultimate showdown was overwhelming.