The Joys of Small Town Life

Our little town’s annual festival is happening this weekend. A is over the moon and every.other.sentence. out of his mouth is about going (!) downtown (!) and riding(!) rides(!). (This is where I would normally berate those parents who would actually let their children ride on portable fair-carnival rides, but that’s another of those words from my pre-parenting days that I swallowed long ago...)

The whole festival (truly) is centered around music, so there is a main stage set up right in the center of town. We usually end up there at the end of our riding extravaganza. Tonight as we were sitting there trying really hard not to listen to A ask for the umpteen-millionth time if he could just pleeeeeeeeeeeeease get a candy apple, our mailman stopped to talk to friends of ours sitting a few yards away from where we were. D told A to run over and tell Mr. Tony, our mailman, that “his head looked OK.” (Without breaking HIPPAA regulations, it appears he had a big lapse in memory not long ago. D sent him for some tests, and all appears to be well.).

So A went over and relayed the prognostic message and went on to ask if Mr. Tony would buy him a candy apple. Mr. Tony not only bought A a candy apple, but he got him some sort of crazy balloon animal hat thing, and he got a bag of cotton candy for J. I chuckled to myself, thinking that only in this charmed little small town life would I ever consider allowing my son to walk away with an adult to whom he is not related and never think twice about his safety.

However, I’m still trying to think of some sort of proper repayment for the mailman, since our kids bounced all the way home on their sugar rush...