Even though my life is pretty much a nonstop party, every fall I get the unshakable urge to hop in my car and go to some, any, kind of festival.
I need that annual fix, to watch people and ceramic geese wearing bonnets, to paw through genuine, collectible whatevers, a pesky clump of caramel off an apple stuck to my chin and my eye on a portable toilet parked far too close, for my taste, to things I might touch.
After a humid summer, I crave a big dose of autumn air, the kind one gets while watching a genuine imitation pioneer cane a chair, make apple butter or trade a good beagle for a side of beef.
But though Indiana tries its best, wherever I've traveled over the past 30 years, no festival has ever lived up to Court Day, which sounds like something people have to go to when they steal apple butter but is actually a fine event in Mount Sterling, Ky.
My family drove 40 miles to Court Day every year when I was a kid, mostly to look at hound dogs and glassware, ask people how much things cost and try to find the cheapest sorghum, a nasty, syrupy concoction made from grain that should have not wasted its time being sorghum but turned itself into beer instead.
A 200-plus-year-old festival held only on Monday years ago but so much darned fun that they stretched it into three days a few years back, Court Day rolls around the third weekend each October.
Because fun in my hometown has long centered largely on following fire trucks, my family usually started planning our trip to Court Day around July.
If you were good, you might get to buy a cool T-shirt or toy at Court Day. If you were bad, you might not get to go to Court Day. If you had wandered away from the family at Court Day last year, or whined in the car, you were threatened with being traded for sorghum at this year's Court Day.
The first order of operation at every Court Day was finding a parking spot, something which took most families 10 minutes but mine, several hours and a couple of vague threats about "never taking you anywhere again as long as you live."
If he had to march us 14 miles to avoid paying some poor slob $1 for a parking spot close to the action, my father would do it. I always assumed it was because he was too cheap to cough up the dollar. Now, I know it was because $1 went a long way toward a bucket o' sorghum (for those not brought up in the country, sorghum is darker and thicker than honey and, if you ask me, not fit for a $2 dog).
According to my relatives who use words like sopped, bread sopped (soaked) in sorghum is better than just about anything except University of Kentucky basketball and Democrats, and much better than former Kentucky Gov. Louie Nunn, who was stumping for office at the 1966 Court Day.
Nunn announced, as I tried to wiggle through the crowd and get away from him, that he was going to "lower taxes for your daddy, little girl." A budding diplomat, I told him my father did not like him.
Nunn looked at me as if he'd just swallowed a snootful of sorghum and laughed. My dad looked at me as if he'd just paid $10 to park and turned several shades of purple.
Turns out, if you make fun of Louie Nunn, you still get to go to Court Day, but you get a talking-to about "being nice, even if he is a Republican."
A few years ago, when I got a little uppity and decided searching for sorghum deals wasn't my cuppa, I stopped going to Court Day with my family.
Still, when fall leaves blow across my yard and it's cold enough for a sweater but not a coat, I remember what it felt like to be 10, with a dollar in my pocket and the world -- or at least, Mount Sterling -- spread out like a crazy quilt in front of me.
And I smile and jump in the car.
I called my sister just a few minutes ago, by the way, to ask whether she'd been to Court Day lately.
"You're writing about sorghum?" Linda said. "Man, that stuff is good with bread and butter."
Somehow, I knew she'd turn out to be the sopper of our generation. I just wonder if she's still up to a 14-mile hike for a free parking spot.
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