The Carnival

Mom stood by the stove, in the stickiness of a hot summer evening, stirring together peanut butter, sugar, and condensed milk. The scent of sour milk clung to the sticky night air, escaping through the window screen and reaching me on the porch railing where I sat watching. I couldn’t bear to be inside the hot kitchen where my mother worked.  As mom stirred, I knew the sour would turn into the sweetness of peanut butter fudge. She had already made chocolate fudge and baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies to sell at our backyard carnival for Muscular Dystrophy.

My sister had sent away for the carnival planning kit advertised during Paul Shannon’s Adventure Time show which we watched every day after school on the local Pittsburgh TV station. We planned our carnival hoping to raise enough money to be invited to the studio and appear on the show. My mom made cookies and fudge on a hot summer evening to help us because she’d watched her brother die from the disease.

The carnival kit came with instructions for planning and advertising our event. We tacked up posters around town, placed ads in The Allied News, our local paper, and listened for our announcement on WEDA, the hometown radio station. The planning kit included an official letter from Paul Shannon himself which we took to local merchants asking them to donate prizes for our carnival. A jewelry store owner donated a ceramic elephant decorated in flecks of gold paint. It had come from a jeweler and was flecked in gold, so I was certain we had scored a valuable raffle prize worth perhaps hundreds of dollars, all because of our official Paul Shannon letter.

We planned simple games: ring toss, a bean bag throw, a fishing pond in a wading pool. I wished we could have had a dunking booth like the one at our downtown street fair each summer. My dad helped us set up a sheet we could poke our heads through so kids could take turns throwing wet sponges at one another. It was close enough.

Because we hoped to raise a lot of money and get ourselves on TV, we wanted to charge a quarter for each of our games and for the refreshments. On the night before the carnival, Dad asked us to lower our prices. He thought a quarter might be too expensive for some of the kids in the neighborhood, and he wanted to be sure everyone who wanted to could come and have a good time.

The day of the carnival arrived, and it exceeded almost all of our expectations. Our front yard was piled high with the bikes neighborhood kids had ridden to our house. Our backyard was full of fun and games and summertime play. We soaked one another with wet sponges. A neighbor boy from across the alley must have spent every bit of loose change he had buying raffle tickets for the gold elephant, which he won.

At the end of the day, we’d raised a couple of hundred dollars. We didn’t reach the threshold for earning an invitation to appear on TV. We were rewarded with a ride on The Gateway Clipper, a party boat which travels the three rivers which meet in the city of Pittsburgh.

Muscular Dystrophy has not been cured; the Muscular Dystrophy Association continues to hold fund-raising telethons every Labor Day weekend. But perhaps our afternoon of backyard summer fun helped a family afford leg braces or a wheelchair. And remembering my parents as they worked alongside us holds great value, worth more to me than an appearance on TV or any gold-flecked jewelry store elephant.

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