When I think about the month of August, two things come to my Midwestern mind: rib burnoffs and the county fair.
Both are strange, painful, but beautiful rituals.
Trying to do anything outdoors in August is not for the faint of heart. A rib burnoff consists of lots of amazing food, but usually on a 90-degree, humid day, with giant men sweating over barbecue pits and slathering ribs with tangy sauces.
You’re probably looking at $20 for three bones of ribs, a warm soda, and an unintended sunburn, all while standing on an asphalt slab with the echoes of a Styx tribute band playing in the background.
Respect to those who participate and endure, but it’s not my cup of tea.
Then there’s the county fair.
It’s still hot, only this time there are animals, food, rides, and everything else. Is it potentially a giant petri dish of germs and contagions? Yes. But the only thing I ever "caught" from time at a fair is nostalgia. Truly, there’s still something magical about it.
Growing up, my childhood fair was the Medina County Fair. When I think of it, close my eyes, and breathe in, the first thing that comes to mind is not manure.
It’s Cool Water cologne.
This may sound strange at first. But let me explain...
For me, the fair is almost like a collective memory machine. Thousands of lives and memories converge in one place for a few days at the end of summer.
But my experience being there, if I am being honest, was about trying to be noticed.
I remember being a teenager who had already been on summer break long enough to begin missing the social ecosystem of school. My friends and I would scheme, coordinate and convince our parents to drop us off for an hour or two.
The point was to meet for a few moments and establish a kind of unspoken social pact before we began walking the fairgrounds in what looked like aimless circles. But it was true performance art.
Teenage roaming designed to appear casual, like we had just happened to be there, drifting through with no agenda at all. But underneath it, there was a very clear strategy of being seen.
Now, each one of us had their own goals.
Me?
I was hoping to be seen by someone who might become my future girlfriend during the upcoming school year, as if the entire fair were a kind of audition and I was trying out for the role.
Maybe I would catch her eye while we passed each other near the lemonade stand. Maybe she would smile. Maybe that tiny moment would increase my chances of getting a note from her in the hallway once school started.
Maybe her note would start with:
“Hey, what’s up? Nothing much here.”
Except not with the word “up,” but a little arrow pointing upward and a heart that followed.
And if one received a heart, that meant something.
See, it was a simple system.
At that age, romance was built almost entirely out of small signals.
A glance. A smile. A carefully timed walk past someone.
And if you were lucky, maybe an awkward phone call later.
But the fair was the perfect place to spark the domino effect of that system.
Tipping that first domino, however, meant deep preparation before attending.
There was DEP hair gel. There were carefully selected clothes. And there were samples of a popular cologne called '“Cool Water” that I had collected from the woman that sprayed perfume at the mall.
Cool Water had this majestic smell. It somehow smelled like the ocean, adulthood, and a sports car I didn’t own.
To me, it represented sophistication.
I would arrive at the fair smelling like I had just stepped off a yacht, even though my mother had dropped me off near the entrance in the family minivan.
Then my friends and I would meet, coordinate, and the ritual would begin.
It’s funny, these memories are hilarious to me now because an entire social ecosystem was unfolding around us.
There were families and farmers and generations of tradition. There were livestock competitions, music, food stands, and there was a form of beauty everywhere. There were thousands of imperfect stories moving past one another in the summer heat.
As a teenager, I barely noticed any of it.
I could only smell my own Cool Water cologne and imagine finding the kind of love John Cusack found in the movie Say Anything.
But maybe that is what the fair gives each of us.
It gives us the same place, but it allows us to experience it through whatever season of life we happen to be in.
And something must have worked during my “Cool Water phase,” because I ended up marrying the most amazing gal in town later in life.
Now when I return as an adult with kids of my own, I try to notice more than I did back then.
I try to focus on the people, traditions, and stories around me rather than remaining trapped inside my own small world.
But even now, every once in a while, somewhere between the food stands and the games, I swear I can still smell Cool Water.
Maybe this year, if you go to your County Fair, you will too...
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