A Day of Medieval Barbarism and Home-Made French Fries

This past day was Columbus Day, which is still a holiday for a few American companies, including my employer, so I had the day off, along with all of the children.

Columbus Day actually began on the eve of the holiday, when Ian decided to cut up a couple of potatoes to make French fries - or Freedom fries, for the true heirs of Ferdinand and Isabella among us. I have no idea why this was the French-fry holiday; my best guess is that Ian had been plotting to make French fries ever since I made the mistake of admitting that they could be made at home, which occurred weeks, if not months, ago. So he took history into his own hands, like the great Italian explorer himself, and cut up the potatoes toward that higher goal. Daniel also cut up a potato, and two bowls and one cup, all consisting of large wedges of potatoes, went into the refrigerator, to be fried the following day.

Holidays, like Saturdays, mean that I get to sleep one to two hours longer than usual, almost exclusively because the children sleep somewhat later themselves. But today's latest, and most concerted, wake-up effort from the boys culminated in Ian's tantalizing question: "Do you want to sleep or fry French fries?" How could anyone think of sleep with such a mesmerizing alternative!

So we fried many potato wedges, some of which I cut into smaller pieces on their way into the pan. As they cooled on the kitchen table, Ian, Daniel, Madeleine and I - and eventually Amy - made sure they didn't get too cold on that lonely plate. A breakfast of excellence. Ian and Daniel were both very, very pleased with the experiment.

Then time came to make plans. We had all been planning on going to the Topsfield Fair - definitely one of the best quasi-agricultural fairs in New England - but both Amy and Madeleine were very congested, and Ian had received an invitation to the home of a friend from school - plus he seems to be a bit "faired-out", so the list of adventurers was down to Daniel and me. Because Daniel was my only "charge" for the day, and hence the list of fair-goers was greatly reduced, I decided to splurge on the much more expensive King Richard's Faire [sic]. This is likely New England's biggest Renaissance festival - or more correctly Medieval festival, and the match of audience to "show" was painfully obvious: knights, swords, jousts, castles, and an overall tendency to place palpable reality on its head - we certainly thought we knew someone who might enjoy this little outing.

And, of course, we were right.

Auntie Suzie and Cousin David joined us for the journey to this eccentric-21st-century-suburban-American-possibly-chemically-inspired attempt at a facsimile of a 14th century English village in the woods. David proceeded with caution, but Daniel became a "villager" at once. He eagerly went over to greet the black-hooded man on stilts, who gave him the "high-five," for which I had to lift the lad. He begged me to buy him a sword - no, none of that foamy stuff; he wanted the real thing. I made the mistake of taking him into The Dungeon where, for two dollars per person, you can (I had forgotten this part) gawk into dungeon cells where manikins were subjected to real or contrived medieval forms of torture and execution. Although it's not what you want your five-year-old to see, the saving grace is that he is, after all, five years old, so many details go over his head - especially since I didn't read a word of the posted explanations or provide any of my own, and tried to trivialize things so that he wouldn't get "the point," and luckily he didn't nearly get his "money's worth."

The main attraction of the festival was The Joust - a formal spear-fight between knights on real horses in the central stadium, with perhaps hundreds of people cheering them on. Suzie had warned me, an a nearby "peasant" confirmed, that there was supposed to be a beheading at the end of the performance. As they whisked the villain, stricken down and immobilized on the stadium floor, toward the place of execution, at the foot of King Richard himself, I turned Daniel away - quickly enough to spare him the "execution" itself, but not quickly enough to avoid some secondary manifestations of the feigned beheading, which will go unmentioned in the interests of taste. Daniel asked me, "Did they kill him?" I said, "You know this is all pretend - right?"

The four of us also swung in what I thought was a swing but Daniel, on the way home corrected me - it was really a "pirate ship," just as the decor indicated.

On the way home, when it was just the two of us, I asked Daniel if he had had a good day. Yes, he confirmed, he had, but he hadn't gotten to see Ian all day. I was very moved by this qualification, so I mentioned it to Ian, who provided his own piece of the same picture:

"I kept thinking about seeing Daniel. I can't believe I went that long without seeing him."

(October 10, 2011)