Great bargains and expensive fried dough

Event: East Middleboro annual 4-H Fair.
Here, every year for the past 60 years, you can come and see/touch the 4-H animals, admire the kids arts & crafts, and find amazing bargains in the used book tent, the “Country Store” (used junk) tent, and the Friday & Saturday Night Auction (more & bigger used junk). All year long, local folks donate/drop off unsold yard sale items, or relics found while cleaning Nana’s attic or stuff from Uncle Mel’s shed that he hasn’t used in many years, etc…. You can browse through all of this potential treasure while munching on freshly cooked food from the fry stand or the grill stand or the country kitchen – also all at below typical market prices.

The book tent is full of used romance novels, and history books and biographies, out-dated atlases and travel guides, old vinyl records (33’s, 45’s ) by Jim Nabors or Ed Ames and lots of Christmas Albums - all very dusty and occasionally moldy. Last year I found three Civil War topic books, but nothing this year.

The Country Store tent is full of roller blades, coffee mugs, obsolete electronics, bags of all sorts (hand, duffle, back, tote..), Christmas decorations, and every item from that junk drawer we all have in the kitchen or tool-shed. There is so much of this hodge-podge that it actually encompasses TWO tents. On Friday & Saturday, most everything goes for a buck apiece. On Sunday, you can fill a shopping bag for a dollar. This year, for one dollar, I got Joe ice hockey skates, a 20ft rope-light, 2 spring-loaded door stoppers, a rabbit cage water dish, a set of steak knives, a sharpening rod, teaspoons, and a can of Bondo.

My favorite part of the whole proceedings is the Auction – from scouring the auction tent to find potential treasures to bid on, getting my “number card” from Stacy The Assistant Auctioneer, to watching the Mazzilli brothers bid against each other to buy the couch they will both sit on for the night (and then re-buy it again the next night – they have never taken “the couch” home in the end) or spend $300 on a stuffed animal that they will then give away to some small child sitting nearby. If one of my kids identify a “MUST-HAVE-IT” item to attempt to win, I will tell them a maximum price, give them the magic “Number Card”, and let them wave it at the auctioneer in hopes that some grownup will notice who they are bidding against and have the decency to not out-bid this poor little desperate kid. When it’s time to get up and get my fried dough, I trustingly leave “the number card” with Sue with specific instructions “if XYZ comes up while I’m gone, bid up to $$ for it”. We have acquired desks, bureaus, lamps, chairs, a swing-set, a 14ft balance beam, a fiberglass rowboat, and other spectacular bargains too numerous to recall using my well-honed methods. Of course, while I will buy most anything I don’t need for a dollar or two, I have missed out on some good and useful items due to my skinflint reluctance to pay fair value. So this year, with Nikki following closely by my side (she was avoiding getting roped into waitressing under the kitchen tent), I searched for worthy items to bid on – but found slim pickings and nothing that excited me (no gymnastics equipment this year, and I didn't actually need the snowblower). Nikki pointed out two stools and a 5ft mirror that she just HAD to have. We took our seats and the auction began, rather uneventfully aside from the 2-sided bookcase for Sue and the pony (stuffed) I won for Julie because she ALWAYS asks me to buy her a pony when I go shopping, and I never had - until now. After an hour or so, I wandered off to get my fried dough – telling Nikki & Sue that if her mirror came up, she could bid up to $10 for it (I was in a generous mood and was confident that a. it wouldn’t come up, and b. that nobody else would want it very badly). As I stood 100 yards away at the fry stand waiting for my snack, I noticed that an enthusiastic bidding war was going on for two old rusty wood-handled bow saws. As I looked closer, I noticed that Nikki was frantically waving my card as the price climbed higher and higher, until her competition dropped out at $20 – leaving her (me) with the winning bid and the useless saws. With my $3 Fried Dough in hand (which is typically the most money I will spend on any single item all weekend), I returned to my seat – annoyed and confused - and asked why we had just spent so much money so foolishly. While Sue looked innocently confused at my indignation, Nikki boldly stated “You said you wanted saws”. I admit – I lost it! “WHAT? I NEVER SAID I WANTED SAWS!”. Sue noticing my turn to anger and the attention my outburst had drawn, adeptly threw Nikki under the bus, saying “but she told me so convincingly that you really wanted them that I believed her and figured that we should make sure we got them for you ‘cause you deserve it”. Realizing in disbelief that I now owned these saws for what I could have purchased a whole off-campus-apartment-full of fine furniture for, I sat down in my chair and concluded that “this is the most expensive piece of Fried Dough I’ve ever bought”.

Nikki still hasn’t fully accepted my apology for my outburst at her. It really was nice of her to try so excitedly to get something that she sincerely thought I really wanted. I did get her the mirror - for $1.