Lessons at the Fairgrounds

I don’t have thick skin; I never have. I don’t apply for jobs that require pushy sales or require dealing with copious amounts of rejection. I just don’t deal well. And, I have far too much time to dream up wonderfully multi-purpose comebacks. I've been taking everything personally lately, so I give you, for the first time ever in print, Karly’s Restore-Your- Faith-in-Humanity Story.

At a very young age, Kelsy and I discovered that our parents would do anything for us. We especially capitalized on the fact that they didn’t mind carrying their sleeping children into the house from any one of the family Suburbans that we inhabited over the course of our childhood. Fake sleeping is a valuable skill; it must be learned. We learned it well. Small for her age, Kelsy milked the technique and used it years beyond my fake-sleeping bit’s shelf life.

I was ten-ish and Kelsy was six-ish that particularly fateful day. Kelsy was being piggybacked around the Pratt County Fairgrounds because she forgot her shoes at home. (Even the pre-tornado fairground was not a safe place for bare feet.) As we piggybacked our way to the makeshift county extension office, spirits among us were low.

I was learning a lesson about loss and responsibility. Mom was speaking gently but purposefully, empathizing for my loss but warning that I may never see my 4-H earnings again. 4-H earnings, besides my allowance paid weekly in beanie babies, were my only income. I made money based on everything from my highest prizes, blue ribbons on sequin horses and rocks painted like ballet shoes, to participation ribbons for my cooking. Even the snake-shaped shortcake with strawberry eyes, whose sugar-laced intestines were accidentally laced with salt, earned me a few dollars that year.

I’d organized and counted my cash obsessively. I ordered the bills so that the smaller ones were on top, working their way up to twenties. Then I’d sandwiched the twenties between the lower bills, the ones and fives guarding their superiors from outsiders. To a ten-year old, one hundred fifty-six dollars was a fortune. (At twenty-three, one hundred fifty-six dollars is still a fortune.) While visiting the livestock and ogling the year’s ride selection, my fortune had gone missing. Purses were far too girly for my tomboy overalls, and the envelope containing my perfectly ordered cash was an ill fit for my pocket.

“It could be gone, Karlybelle. So you can’t be too upset okay?”

“Okay,” I’d mumbled.

“We have to take care of our things,” mom said.

Mom nudged me forward. I lost the money, so I needed to ask if anyone had found it.

“Has anyone turned in some money in an envelope?” I asked.

The woman smiled at us, “Can you describe the envelope, sweetie?”

I launched into my description, barely breathing, “The flap was blue and it had white paw prints on it and it had money in it.”

“How much money?” she asked.

“One hundred and fifty-six dollars.” I was mid-way through describing my hand-writing and my dollar sign with one line- not two- when I was interrupted.

She pulled my blue-flapped envelope from a drawer in her desk.

I climbed into the very back seat of the Suburban and Kelsy’s “forgotten” shoes shifted beneath my feet. I ordered and reordered my one hundred fifty-six dollars. Someone had found- and returned- every last dollar of a ten-year-old girl’s sequined-horse income.