Laboring, and ruminating, over lemons

At the Nebraska State Fair yesterday, I struck up a conversation with a young guy, mid-20s, staffing one of the ubiquitous lemonade stands. I do this sort of thing in part because I'm an old reporter, trained to observe, question and chronicle the human condition in its myriad, wonderful and awesome forms. But mostly I do it because it embarrasses my teenage daughter when I dare to be seen and/or heard in her presence.

So, I leaned on the sticky counter and began talking, as I felt my daughter tensing beside me and preparing to bolt, though she was somewhat of a captive audience, not having procured her lemonade yet.

"So, do you do this all summer?," I asked. "No," he said. "All year long."

That's right. All year long. He said he and his crew spend winters in Texas and points south, then head north for fair season. I presume they stop every six months or so to hose the seeds and pulp off equipment and their bodies. I presume, too, that every time they move from one city to another they contemplate ending it all by driving their truck head-on into a bridge abutment, scattering lemons across the highway and into the ditches, because they just can't stand the thought of going to one more backwater town and serving lemonade to one more thirsty rube waving a smoked turkey leg in one hand and a corn dog in another and with lips still caked with powdered sugar from the funnel cake and deep-fried cookie dough that he just finished shoving down his gullet.

OK, I'm reading too much into a five-minute encounter. As far I know, the young man is utterly fulfilled in his work. The money's probably better than I think; I mean, good grief, it's a little squeezed lemon and a whole lot of water and ice, at $5 a pop. And I did tip him more generously than I otherwise would have, figuring I owed him. Total: just under $30 for my party of five. And at the risk of being indelicate, I'll bet he gets all the fairground action he can handle; compared to, say, the guy running the stuffed-banana race game with the missing teeth, cigarette hanging from his lip and pungent aroma, this guy's frickin' George Clooney.

Maybe our hero has big plans. I'd like to think so. Perhaps he's doing this until he's salted away enough savings to pursue his real dream: developing the technology to recycle the leftover food people dump in the garbage on the fairgrounds -- from turkey bones and Italian sausage to popcorn and candy bars -- by grinding and shaping it, surrounding it with breading, deep frying it and covering it with chocolate or powdered sugar. He'll market it as "deep-fried fairground surprise." "Try a REAL taste of the fair!!!," the signs will say.

If you think Americans won't eat something cooked in a tiny fair booth with uncertain sanitation and with the word "surprise" in it, keep in mind that by the time he refines this idea, 75 percent of us will be moving our manatee-like bodies around the grounds on those personal scooters, our legs having atrophied into veritably vestigial organs. I mean, good Lord, people, a walk around the fairgrounds or any shopping mall makes one wonder if most of us at this point are just living our lives as just a big fat "f*%# you" to health experts, not to mention to our hearts, lungs, kidneys and colons. Our enemies foreign and domestic, real and imagined, economic and military, need not attack; they need only give us another 25 years or so and we'll be unable to roll out of bed, let alone put up a fight.

Well, I see I'm 600 words into what was supposed to be a Labor Day paean to work in which I was going to make some salient, perhaps even poignant, points about the value of labor in all its forms, whether one is an itinerant lemonade maker, a university writer/editor or Warren Buffet, and throw an encouraging shout-out to those who are without work in this economy. Instead, I ran off the rails and ended up the same place where far too many of my creative visions land -- fairworker sex and manatees on scooters.

So, I'm gonna end this now -- as I did my conversation with the fairworker, I'm proud to say -- before I embarrass myself further by making some reference to that old saw about life giving you lemons.

Happy Labor Day.