Finding Home

State fairs were always quite large, and the Texas State Fair was no exception; hell, if you wanted to make it an exception, I would say it is because it is one of the biggest State Fairs I have ever seen. As a child, I would always cling to my mother’s hand as we walked through it. Of course, with my childhood excitement being the equivalent of a dog being told they were going to a dog park, I would try to drag her towards every attraction possible; to this day, I find it a miracle that she was able to keep me in control.

Still, even then, she allowed me to wander and pull her in the directions I wanted to go. As long as I was holding her hand, I was free to go wherever I wanted the both of us to go.

I don’t really remember her face whenever we go to the State Fair, but in recent years, I started to wonder what she thought of my childhood self during these State Fair escapades. Sure, I was quite the mischievous troublemaker as a child, but I would imagine I was even more rambunctious at a place with sounds, sights, and smells galore.

One day, I finally decided to ask her what she thought of our yearly trips to the State Fair. She smiled sadly at me when I asked this: “I’ll miss them. I’ll miss seeing you smile as you pull my hand with a strength I never thought a child could have.”

She gave me a kiss on the cheek before turning to leave. “Good luck at college, my dear.”

---

As the years passed, I graduated from college with my undergraduate degree. Even as I poured myself over my studies, one thing seemed to always crawl into my mind: the State Fair. As I quietly reflect on my yearly journeys to the Fair with my mother, I chuckled at the fact that I was much better at understanding the layout of the fair than my mother; in almost all of my recollections, she would get us both lost quite easily if it weren’t for the fact that I was the resident map navigator.

The State Fair was still on my mind even when I got through grad school and found a career as a professor at Cambridge University. Eventually, though, memories fade: I found myself too engaged in my studies and teaching to reminiscence about my childhood: after all, I had other responsibilities.

By the time I became head of the faculty, my parents had retired. I sent them a congratulatory letter, and they asked when I was going to visit. Soon, I would reply. “Soon” was a word that they had come to expect when they asked me that question.

My mother asked that question to me again, and I was about to give the same response when I noticed that there were teardrops in the letter she sent me.

Then the realization hit: dad passed away, and it was already a week since his funeral

And yet I was so engrossed in my studies that I didn’t give time to the people I loved the most.

When I emerged from the confines of both my study and my university, I decided it was finally time to pay my mother a visit.

Even though she greeted me with open arms, I felt guilt and emptiness as I hugged her: dad should have been here, too. Before I could say anything, however, my mom grinned in a childlike manner as she said the following words: “Let’s go to the Fair!”

It took me a minute to digest the words: despite me having basically abandoned her and dad, this was the first thing she said to me?

“Are you sure?”

She was.

---

It still baffled me that even in her old age and the fact that she was confined to a wheelchair, she wanted to go to the State Fair just like old times. And with the ever-present thought of the dreaded day when my mother would also leave this planet, I suppose I could let her have what she wants; after all, she did the same for me as a child.

As I reflect on what I now realized to be our last State Fair together, I remember taking a map from the front entrance and then asking her which parts of the Fair she wanted to experience. She merely smiled at me and replied, “We’ll figure that out on the way.”

Even though small parts of the Fair’s layout changed over the years, it has mostly stayed the same. Even then, I remembered that as we both got older, my mother would always hand me the map to let me guide us through the labyrinth of stalls, attractions, and people bustling up and down the paths. Directions, even on a smaller scale, were not always here strong suit.

But this year, after glancing at the map for a couple of seconds, I decided to return it to the sign where I originally found it. I turned to my mother and gave her a kiss on the head. “How about you lead the way this time, mom?”

Her eyes lit up so brightly. I guess when you reach a certain age, the things that excited you as a kid excite you once again. Through the guidance of (or rather, the lack thereof) her pointer finger, we wandered through the fair with no destination in mind. Whenever something interested her, she pointed to that spot and I pushed her wheelchair in that direction.

We continued like that until the fair closed. By then, I wasn’t sure how many dead ends we reached: I think I lost count at around twenty. It didn’t really matter though; all that mattered was being able to see my mother smile as gleefully as I did when I was a small child, clinging onto her hand when we first entered the State Fair.