Renaissance
Fair
The Renaissance
Fair in
After all the hype
in the newspapers and all the talk at school of Camelot, knights in shinning
armor and all that, I climbed from the car after an hour and half drive to find
thousands of tourists lined at the gate and the ticket masters sucking money
from their wallets, ten bucks at a clip.
All the way
back, Susan and I fought about my rotten mood the whole time I was there, about
how I kept complaining. Two bucks for a hot dog, three bucks for a coke. Forget
the price of a tee shirt, I hadn't brought enough along for that. She said such
events cost money to put on. Where could I find a Shakespeare play performed
for such a price as low as that? Let alone the other performances from mud
wrestlers to belly dancers, to snatches of Chaucer.
"But
it's so middle class!" I protested, trying to keep a decent pace with the
heavy exit traffic down the highway, my car grumbling about going to slow.
"And
what's wrong with that?" she asked, eyeing me from the passenger side. She
really didn't understand my revulsion, how the world of the baby-boomer had
turned into homogenized milk, every lump, every curd, smoothed out into
something palatable to their lackluster tastes. Even midlevel times, polished
up, presented on a platter without blood or inconvenience.
It made me
sick. And I took it out on Susan, as if it was all her fault.
Which it was.
She was the
product of a working class family: father, mother and brother, all seeking that
ideal middle state, where nothing was too hot or cold, where nothing stood out
too much or remained too hidden, where life went on day in and day out in the
same predictable pattern: Work life Monday through Friday, dating Friday night,
home before the TV set on Saturday and Sunday. For her life was a station wagon
full of kids, rolling around from one mall to another in search of jeans or
sneakers or a grill for the outdoor barbeque.
The pattern
of behavior made honest experience unnecessary, in fact, not desired. Who
wanted to go somewhere and not know before hand what you'd find when you got
there? Or pay through the teeth for things we could have purchased much more
cheaply at a more local location such as a mall?
We bickered.
She got out of the car when we reached a traffic light near the edge of her
town.
"I'll
walk," she said coldly.
I said,
"Fine," then drove away.
Half a mile
later, I turned around, then when I couldn't find her on the street, I drove to
her house, parked, then sat on the step until she got there.
I was tired.
She was tired. We argued over stupid things, when behind our words was the fear
of her going away in September, and her resentment at graduation for not being
offered more in the way of a graduate scholarship than she was, needing to make
the next rung of the success ladder, finding it just beyond her financial
reach.
I was pissed
because her plans left no room for me. She would go away for a year and leave
be behind, to flounder, to wonder what place I'd have in her life when she got
back -- if she did come back, if I did have a place.
I was also
thinking about the real past, the real Renaissance, when some poor fool
stepping off a carriage, found his boot deep in horse shit, and he, as pissed
as I am now, wondering about the future the way I was about the past, wondering
if maybe things would be better in my era, no horseshit -- no horses, for that
matter.
And yes,
things are better, in some ways, I'd tell him. But in some ways, they are definitely
not.