Young Garrison Keillor at the State Fair -- The Rise of Romanticism, a Happy Story (Part 1)

A young Garrison Keillor is at the state fair. He is not particularly happy to be there. He is uncomfortable around the country-folk, dirty teeth and jeans make his heart race. He has no sweet tooth, and is repulsed by the mounds of fried sugar he sees enveloped in the tobacco stained mouths of men and women clad in garishly comical flannel outfits. Not enjoying candy is only one thing among many that differentiate little Garrison from the other boys, and the other boys clearly do not like him. They spit into the air on the teacups, leaving levitated luggies in the path of the queasy Young Garrison. He spends most of his time at the fair hiding between idling vintage tractors and behind the pigs.
He pretends he is in a small office in a midsized town. He shuffles pretend paperwork from one pile to another, stamping each with a rock and furrowing his brow at the stacks, that even in his mind he cannot hope to keep up with. It is his favorite game. He plays it for hours without tiring.

At this particular state fair, featuring a three-time champion prize pig and a woman with a goatee at the cotton candy machine, Young Garrison was using his imaginary lunch break to write an imaginary letter to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He wondered, rhetorically, just how the magazine could propose to be of any relevance to the modern world, with its Playboy and Mad Magazine. He was just working up to his conclusion when he was startled by the sudden appearance of a giant red balloon.

“Get out of here balloon,” Garrison said, “You’re whimsy is ephemeral, and contingent on my perception of you as an abstraction!” The balloon re-asserted its redness. “And I assume you think your redness to be in stark contrast to the brown-green expanse of the field, particularly the hazy exhaust of the tractors, which you are presently set against.” The balloon rose in altitude a bit, and teased Young Garrison about the forehead with its pink ribbon.