Our State Fair: Pain and pride, miracles and a double rainbow after the storm

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We had to wedge in our State Fair trip this year, like a steaming pile of yellow cheese curds crammed into every corner of a paper basket that threatened to collapse at any moment. That’s how full life felt this summer: two kids, six or so jobs between us adults, aging parents, a short stint at Children’s Hospital, 48 hours without electricity and an air conditioner on its last legs in the 70-some-year-old home we’d purchased seven years ago.

We’d spent the previous 48 hours standing vigil at a family member’s side a few states away, just five months after a shocking cancer diagnosis. His cancer “journey” felt more like riding a roller coaster — a slow and steady climb filled with confusing new medical jargon, an intense surgery, aborted treatments and then a sudden free fall screaming down the hill. We would’ve stayed longer, but life and jobs called us back to Minnesota for the last week of summer before the start of school.

Monday at 4 p.m. was the only chance we had to go to the fair, so we headed out there despite heat advisories and warnings of yet another brutal thunderstorm. When we walked past the entrance, we remembered pausing there last year for a photo with our loved one who is now tormented by cancer. It had been his first time to the fair and, as the only native Minnesotans among the adults in our group, I remembered how proud I was that day that everyone was having such a good time. Our family had been no stranger to tragedy and discord the previous few years, but who couldn’t bond over Sweet Martha’s chocolate chip cookies?

A few short hours later, we were watching chicks peck their way out of fertilized eggs, damp with sweat, when the warnings came that everyone needed to seek shelter. Fresh off watching the movie “Twister,” we dashed across the road to the horticulture building where people milled around drinking craft beer and staring at the deluge outside, our bodies covered with the brown, sticky dirt that was lofted into the air during the wind gusts that preceded the thunderstorm.

“At least we made a memory,” I told the kids on the bus back to the church lot, their rubber clogs soaked with mud.

As the sky turned a deep orangey red and two rainbows stretched across the horizon, it seemed like maybe that’s where it would end this year, beauty alongside the tragedy of no butter princesses or raspberry malts. But I had a ticket to attend again the next day for a newspaper event, and my youngest son said he’d join in exchange for a promise to try his hand at the basketball game at the Midway.

Day two was a day of miracles: My son made five of his six shots and won two basketballs and a stuffed giraffe. Age 8 is really the golden age for stuffed animals, a last gasp of the magic of childhood before it’s exchanged for cellphones and cynicism.

I had this sense then that I was trying to grasp onto moments that were flying quickly out of my reach. Summer was ending, the first day of school was nigh, the presidential election in just a few months. I’d spent the past six years researching right-wing radicalism and conservative Christianity in its moral bargaining with the zero-sum violence and win-at-all-costs ethics of Trumpism. So many times I’d thought the anger and rancor of our politics and religion was in its last gasp, that people would turn to one another anew with mutual respect and regard, to see each other again as neighbors. Every time I thought it was going to be peaceful again, something terrible happened. You get suspicious of hope itself.

We walked back to the Miracle of Birth Center. I looked again with awe at the farm kids caring for the animals with studied practice and expertise. We watched a chick fully peck its way into the world, into life itself. As always, I empathized for a moment with the exhausted mothers in the barn, surrounded by suckling babies, desperately recovering after the trauma and miracle of birth.

After that, we had time only for buffalo cheese curd tacos and sat down to eat in front of the BOB (106.1 FM) country radio stage. I might live in Minneapolis now, but I grew up closer to BOB territory at the far edge of the northwest suburbs across from a cornfield that would become my junior high school. It’s all suburban strip malls now. There’s no question a lot has changed in this state. My congressional district is represented by a Somali American woman who wears a Muslim headscarf. Minnesota has two female senators. In school, kids learn not just about the pride of the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg, but also that just 90 minutes from Minneapolis, quaint Mankato was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

Some would say that learning the shameful parts of our history, like violence and atrocities against Indigenous Minnesotans or the fact that the long-vaunted Minnesota miracle of prosperity largely left out Black Minnesotans, makes white kids like mine feel ashamed of themselves, unable to participate in state and national pride.

I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I see that it’s not when I bring my kids to a Minnesota State Fair that represents the fullness of our state in all its pain and pride and burgeoning diversity. These 322 acres were the same ones I walked back in the mid-90s, but everything else had changed and grown. And somehow the fair found ways to keep us all here, together, as uncomfortable and crowded as it felt sometimes for white descendants of Scandinavians and Germans who don’t like change (just try getting a Lutheran church to agree on what color to change the carpet to in the sanctuary).

At the BOB stage, we happened to be just in time for a local band to play. Adam Brandt and his bandmates were squished together on the tiny stage while we sat on benches and ate our cheese curd tacos. Suddenly, a bearded man with his arm in a sling snatched the stuffed giraffe out of my son’s arms. Before I could say anything, he was turning it upside down and swatting at a hornet that had buried its way into the giraffe’s soft golden spotted fur. My son and I both react allergically to bee stings. I exhaled a deep sigh of relief.

“He was waiting for you to pick it up,” the man said.

“Thank you so much!” I said.

“Just clap really loud for me,” he said, gesturing to his injured arm that left him unable to applaud.

“Do you know the band?” I asked.

“He’s my son,” the man said, a look of embarrassed pride creasing his face into a shy smile.

I was instantly transported back to the night when Gov. Tim Walz officially accepted the nomination for vice president at the Democratic National Convention, and his son, Gus, standing teary-eyed shouted: “That’s my dad!”

It was another one of those moments where I thought decency might transcend partisanship until conservative radio and TV hosts mocked Gus, though they later rescinded their comments.

I felt a similar pull as I gazed down Judson Avenue, up Liggett to Dan Patch, where our transit bus awaited.

“That’s my fair!”

But it wasn’t. It isn’t. It has to be Ours, sweaty and smelly and dirty and crowded and oily and lard-y and cheesy and bursting at its seams, containing humanity together in-person and off our ever-present screens, forced to coexist, to save each other from hornet stings and hatred and authoritarianism alike.