“Ducks!” Sam said, and rushed to the side of the little pool.
Yellow bathtub ducks were circling in a blue plastic pool. The water was a worrisome gray-green color, and the ducks looked a mite moldy themselves. Sam didn’t care; he grabbed one of the floating toys, shouted “duck!” (which could have been either description or warning) and fired it back into the water with a splash.
“How about a prize for the little guy?” the carnival barker said. “Everyone’s a winner.”
Sam grabbed again, shouted again, threw again. The barker leaned in conspiratorially, as though Sam would understand what he was saying. “Basically, it’s how much you want to spend,” he said. “The prizes hanging up” – there were inflated plastic bats and figures and whatnot clipped to the pole in the pool’s center– “are $5 and the ones in the bin” – a wire mesh cage on the ground – “are $2. They pick a duck, and they win.”
I pondered. Should I just say “no,” or should I launch into a diatribe on my philosophic objections to the Barney-ized, self-esteem-driven “everyone’s a winner” approach to life, which has yielded a generation which believes the world owes them a car, a cell phone and pocket money?
Then I realized I hard a better excuse. “I don’t have any money,” I said. “My wife has it all.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I have a wife too.”
Sam was still throwing ducks, crying out in triumph at each splash.
“You mind if he plays with the ducks?” I asked.
“No, that’s fine. Maybe it’ll drum up business.”
So for the next 10 minutes I stood watching humanity stream by in its bulgy, sun-burnt glory while Sam threw ducks and celebrated. And it did seem to drum up business, with other children wondering what the curly-haired not-yet-two-year-old was up to.
It was, in a way, an act of surrender.
My wife and I had taken Sam to the fair with visions of him laughing through the kiddie rides, petting bunnies and horsies and goats, bouncing on one of those big inflatable moonwalk things, and generally soaking in the sights and sounds.
It had not quite been so.
He tolerated the carousel. The bouncy moonwalk thing cost extra, and I’m cheap. We did, however, buy him a pony ride for an extra $3. He tried to escape halfway through, clinging to me as I tried to hold him on the saddle.
So we headed toward the animal barns, only to be waylaid by a display of tractors. Sam climbed on a little John Deere and perched in the bright yellow seat. “Tractor!” he said, bouncing, then clambered back off to climb on a bigger John Deere.
I could have stayed there a while, dreaming of a beasty little tractor with a front end loader and a backhoe – toys for boys, I’m telling you – but my wife was committed to the bunnies/horsies/goats vision, so we dragged him off toward the barns.
Now, the barns at the fair are mostly long low sheds, designed for single rows of cows. The cows are tied facing in toward the feeding troughs. So when you go “see the animals,” what you mostly see is row after row of cow derrieres.
Ick.
The horse barn was a bit better. Sam got up close with a couple of noses through the bars of the stalls. Then he apparently startled a big draft horse, which spread its lips and bared its teeth. It’s lips were about the size of Sam’s entire head and its teeth were all yellow and crooked and horror-movie-looking, and that was the end of the horse barn.
He was briefly intrigued by a caboose sitting on a stretch of rail. “Thomas!” he called out. But the caboose lacked Thomas the Tank Engine’s gentle personality, and that didn’t last long either.
Finally, realizing that I could not predict what would catch Sam’s fancy, I just put him down and followed him while my wife was off in search of funnel cake.
He wandered through the crowd, staring up at people and sometimes saying “hi!” It was fun to watch them laugh, then look around for the attending parent. Seeing me, they would laugh again.
Then Sam found a dusty driveway, sat down and started pouring dust on my shoes. That got boring (for me) after a few minutes, and I nudged him along until he found the ducks.
I got different looks from other parents at the duck pool. They would watch Sam splashing in the water (he was soaked when we finally left), then look up at me with an expression of vague disapproval.
Then they would hand Willie (by this time we knew the barker’s name) their $2 or $5 and send the children off to choose prizes. Sometimes they did not even bother with the picking-up-a-duck part.
Then off they’d go, with the children looking back at Sam with expressions that said, “I’d rather be doing what he’s doing.”
And it struck me as I stood there that maybe in my desperation to keep Sam happy I had actually done the right thing. Rather than buying him a prize, I had let him enjoy himself. Rather than forcing my idea of fun on him, I had let him show me what his idea of fun was. And rather than reflexively saying “no!” to the splashing, and I had asked instead what harm it could do (other than exotic diseases from the water, of course).
And you know what? Contrary to what the T-shirts say, in this case freedom really was free.