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I took Tuesday as a vacation day from work so that I could spend a full day at the Southwest Washington Fair. It was well worth it.
The fair is always a blast. You see so many people you know, learn so much at all the booths, and have a chance to get face-time with charming critters, from goats to swine.
What really made an impression on me this year was seeing the fair for what it is at its heart — a chance for kids to learn, grow and be recognized for their accomplishments in a fun, supportive setting. Time goes slowly at the fair for most of the week, dominated by the chores of caring for animals, but the languid pace is punctuated with excitement and intensity during showing or the sale. And throughout there are the moments of connection and maturity as kids engage with strangers, showing what they know and inviting others to take part.
The kids are raising animals. But the fair is helping raise the kids.
I saw that after stopping off at the Poultry Barn early in the day. I met a few FFA kids who told me about their chickens, proudly showing off their lavender wyandottes and other fascinating varieties. We talked chickens for a few minutes then I headed off down the Midway. An hour or so later, I happened to see the pair of students down by the rides and they waved, then invited me to the chicken judging at 3 p.m.
I wasn’t going to miss that.
When I arrived, I saw high-schoolers lined up in their thick FFA jackets on a sweltering day. An older woman wearing a long white coat embroidered with a smiling bird and “Judge Mary” on the back was examining all the fowl. She was straight with the students. She told them how it is without fluff. Honestly, she blew their hair back just a little. Gruff, you might call her.
“When I’m talking to you, you look at me,” she said to them sternly. “When I ask you a question, look at me as you give your answer.”
If her comments had been directed at any particular student, one might be tempted to think her manner was angry.
But it wasn’t.
It was laying out expectations with refreshingly old-fashioned plainness.
You could see the eyes of a few of the students get big for a moment. Adults rarely talk to kids like that these days. But she followed up by teaching them how to better handle their birds, then had them practice holding them upside down with one hand. She made it look easy but when they tried it, the birds did a whole lot of fluttering and flapping.
“Hmm,” you could almost hear the kids say to themselves. “She knows a thing or two. If I pay attention, I might learn something.”
After the presentation and judging was finished, the woman looked around at the crowd of onlookers and said loudly as she led applause, “didn’t they do a great job? They did a great job!”
Within just a few minutes, you could see the kids grow a little taller, stand a little straighter, and rightly feel a little more confident — all because they attended to the high standards and rose to the expectations of the unvarnished talk delivered by a woman from another era who might have been scary at first.
It’s a preventive antidote to the anxiety that plagues so many young people these days.
You don’t build strong adults by treating kids with kid gloves. Instead, you tell them how it is, help them grow, expect a lot of them, then join them in celebrating their successes.
I tried something similar on Tuesday, arriving a few hours early at the fair with my teenage son. We had volunteered to help shuck corn for the Rotary corn-on-the-cob booth, preparing raw ears donated by National Frozen Foods for boiling and sale to folks on the Midway.
For a couple hours on a summer morning, we stepped back in time to the mindless but valuable work of sitting together and processing produce.
Our grandparents knew the feeling well of spending hours shucking corn, or snapping and stringing green beans, peeling apples, or the countless other types of garden prep work that went before canning, cooking or freezing.
It was a time when generations mixed together doing repetitive tasks that led to a simple but heartening feeling of accomplishment. It's a time to talk and work together to feed your family or neighbors.
Is it fun? Not like a video game, certainly, but in a deeper way, yes.
It’s better than fun, in fact.
It’s rewarding. It's satisfying. It's good. We need a lot more of that.
Effort instead of ease.
“OK, sir” instead of “OK, Boomer.”
Talk-talk instead of Tik-Tok.
Work instead of woe-is-me.
If this makes me sound hopelessly out-of-touch, I'll wear that proudly. Watch a third-grader direct a 245-pound pig around and tell me I'm wrong.
Fair week is a reminder that the old-fashioned ways are still alive and they still work.
Take time this weekend to browse the fair, to talk to the kids, to say hi to the animals, and to take a step back in time as you imagine how bringing back a lot more of the aggy ways of old could lead us to a more hearty, healthy and happy future.
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Brian Mittge is a community enthusiast who has written for The Chronicle since 2000 as a reporter, editor and columnist. He can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
