September, Wishing I Had a Pronto Pup

I feel a little sad and sort of disenfranchised in September heading for October and for the fourth year in a row having missed the Minnesota State Fair and not eaten Pronto Pups or cheese curds or hot buttered corn on the cob. I am a Minnesotan, though I live in New York, and as such am sensible, wary of excess, and the Fair is our annual Feast Of Things You’ve Been Warned Against. We go see the livestock barns, the various gaudy breeds of poultry, bins of grains and vegetables in the Horticulture Building, watch the horse judging, but while walking the grounds we pick up our favorite forbidden foods, all of them portable. Walking gives us privacy and also aids in digestion. There is now a Fair Food app that will guide you to a Frozen Mango Tango or S’mores or Bison Meatballs. You take a break on the Ferris wheel and a carousel to settle the contents in your gut and then top off the day with a dish of Hawaiian Sunrise shaved ice and take yourself home to repent with a double Alka-Seltzer.

This is an extravagant exercise in the unwise that can plant your feet back on the straight and narrow just as releasing a bombshell of profanity can cleanse the heart of anger or listening to three Rolling Stones albums in a row can make you grateful to be elderly and leading a peaceable life.

The Fair is also one time when we’re all together in one place, the anti-vaxxers and the p.c. police, the radical Marxists, the Flat Earthers, the Apocalyptic Baptists, and so far nobody has suggested that Pronto Pups contain an enzyme that will make you accept the Establishment version of the news.

The Fair was created by farm organizations as a gathering of farmers and their families, to see the latest machinery and learn about innovations and compete for blue ribbons and also to connect with each other and have a good time. The prosperous grain farmers of western Minnesota and the big poultry and hog and beef producers and also my people, the marginal 150-acre dairy farmers who raised feed for the cattle and a few chickens for eggs and a vegetable garden to feed the family. Holstein cows were a generous animal who enabled hardworking families to wrest a living from hilly, rocky land no good for big crops. As a boy, visiting the farm, I sensed not much delight in the lives of Holsteins. They knew they were not kept around because the farmer loved them. Horses had names, Brownie, Pete, Prince, and cows didn’t, same as your lawnmower didn’t or the hand pump. They were simply a means to an end, machines for making milk, and when their productivity declined, they’d be led up a ramp onto a truck and shipped away to be turned into hamburger.

My dad had four sisters and three brothers. None of the girls married a farmer and only one of the boys became a farmer. All of them saw hard times up close as the Depression closed in. They saw hunger and broken lives and despair around them and determined to avoid it. All but one of them became a gardener. They read about starvation in Europe after the war, people foraging in the garbage for edibles, people eating rodents, dogs. My dad kept a half-acre garden, which fed his six kids. I grew up, never thinking about malnourishment except as something you read about in books. My generation rebelled against the farm life and sought freedom to be carefree, maybe wild. We wrote poetry. We imagined becoming interesting individuals. We were ready for rock ’n’ roll to shake our nerves and rattle our brain, break our will but what a thrill, great balls of fire.

Jerry Lee Lewis wouldn’t have been tolerated back in hard times with people going hungry. We thought it was rebellious but really it was the product of prosperity created by hardworking farmers and gardeners. So I went to the Fair for the Pronto Pup and the cheese curds but also to walk around the barns and mingle with farmers — you could pretty well distinguish them from the accountants and schoolteachers — and take deep breaths of farm smells and think about my ancestors. My grandpa James Keillor, an old man bundled up on a bitter cold day in 1925, pitchfork in hand, grinning, the pleasure of working hard outdoors.

Garrison Keillor © 09.22.25