Friday is, in my ideal plan of writing for several days at home and then going out and about, my "gallivanting" day. 

Gallivanting. I love that word. It sounds like an Irishism, but I remember it mostly from my father. "That car is not for gallivanting," he said once when I was just about the age Lynn is now. I'd gone out to the shopping center for school supplies one August afternoon and returned three hours later. According to the dictionary, the word's been in use only since 1823 and means "to go about ostentatiously or indiscreetly with members of the opposite sex," or, more generally, "to travel, roam, or move about for pleasure." Come to think of it now, my mother's word for this was "trotting," and she disapproved of it. She considered "trotting" to the stores or to friends' houses or other places where young people gathered to be an almost sinful waste of time.

Today I gallivanted to the Pennsylvania State Farm Show. There was a work component to the trip. I'd learned from the newspaper that there was a scale model of a Pennsylvania German barn on display, and I wanted to see it.

The Pennsylvania State Farm Show, held each January since 1936, is the largest indoor agricultural exposition in North America. The venue is the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, a series of buildings enclosing 16 acres under one roof. It is situated just over the railroad tracks from the city neighborhood where I grew up and about two miles as the crow flies from where I live now. This area used to be nearly rural, even in my lifetime, but is now fairly built up.

Even though I was a city girl, I visited the Farm Show frequently as a kid. My parish always had a food booth, preparing and selling subs (sandwiches on long rolls, called "grinders" or "hoagies" in some parts of the country) and funnel cakes. (Funnel cakes are a Pennsylvania German delight of fried batter covered with powdered sugar. There's nothing in the batter, such as an onion ring or a mushroom or even a piece of fruit, it's just the batter, fried.) We could walk (supervised) across the Maclay Street Bridge from school to the farm show grounds, and one afternoon during each show the seventh and eighth graders were allowed to trek on over, look at the cows and the pigs, and buy a sub and a soda from Our Lady's booth.

I spent my entire professional life among farm kids. When I started teaching at Lower Dauphin High School in 1970, the FFA (Future Farmers of America) was the largest, strongest, most worthwhile organization in the school. LD had a "vo-ag" (vocational agriculture) curriculum, and over the years I learned a lot about farming because that's what many of my students wrote about and did their speeches and research projects on. My favorite classroom sign was contributed one year by the president of the FFA: "If you want to make fun of farmers, go ahead. Just don't talk with your mouth full."

My arrival at LD coincided with the start of the suburbanization of that area. The city was pushing eastward, and the new medical school and hospital in Hershey was pushing westward, and one by one many of the big family farms were sold to developers. Eventually we had more kids whose parents were chocolate company or medical school workers than kids whose parents were farmers. Some time in the 1990s the vo-ag curriculum was phased out, and eventually the school chapter of the FFA disbanded. When the building was remodeled in 1996 the small engines shop and the greenhouse and the conservation lab became a technology center. Now you could learn to lay out a farm and manage your livestock on a computer but never actually touch the soil nor handle an animal.

I saw lots of the familiar blue FFA jackets today. I entered the complex at the area where large pieces of farm equipment were on display. It was something like a new car showroom except that some of the machines were bigger than my house and the tires taller than I am. Most of them were in John Deere green or Farmall red, and I knew what very few of them were called or used for. (I did see a shiny new snow plow. I know what that's for. Local wisdom holds that it always snows during Farm Show week. It snowed last night, enough so that Lynn's school had a two-hour delay this morning.)

I had to walk through the food court to get to the rest of the show. Most of the concessions featured Pennsylvania produce. We're known for apples, peaches, and mushrooms. Auntie Anne's pretzels originated in Pennsylvania (as did pretzels themselves, according to legend). I had a Farm Show baked potato ("Farm Show" is a brand of Pennsylvania potato rivaling Idaho russets in high quality potato-icity), a frozen strawberry slushy thing sweetened with Pennsylvania honey, and a slice of shoo-fly pie (authentic wet bottom -- if you don't know what I'm talking about you are missing an experience of one of the world's perfect foods).

The barn replica was at the very far end of the complex, so I had an opportunity to wander through nearly the whole show. In one of the small arenas I saw an exhibition of sheep and in another some heifers. The grand champion dairy cow was being chosen in the large arena. The judge explained his choice aloud. "Just look at that femininity," he said. "Her teats are uniform and her udder is strong." Cattle being shown in this way don't look like the grazing herds you'll find along roads in Lancaster County, straggly-haired and dusty and with flies in their ears. They're all dolled up in Sho-Sheen and hoof black. Nevertheless, despite these efforts and my loving familiarity with student demonstration speeches on the subject, I am at a loss to appreciate the beauty of a strong udder.

My path to the replica barn took me through the area where most of the cattle are housed for the week. A lot of exhibitors live there along with their specimens, and their pen areas are decorated like a summer camp cabin. You have to be careful where you walk, of course, and to keep clear of the hind end of individuals being moved from one area to another. Huge fans help with the ventilation. I find that the natural odors of the animals themselves are not unpleasant. It's the wet hay, some of it beginning to rot, that lodges in my nose and my clothes and wafts off my hair even now, several hours after I've left.

At the wall where I crossed the boarding facility into the major exhibition hall I saw the row of champions, the pig, the dairy cow, the sheep -- only the Grand Champion Steer has yet to be chosen. The animals stood docile or slept under signs advertising what business had bought them -- Hoss's Steak House, Hatfield Farms (a pork packager). Most of the animals are raised by youngsters as FFA or 4-H projects, and proceeds from the sale (Hoss's always pays a premium, even for meat still on the hoof) can put a kid through college. The newspaper always carries a photo of the tearful good-bye between kid and cow as the Grand Champion is lead away, the kid left holding a check instead of a lead rope.

Finally in the main exhibition hall I found the replica barn. It's a reproduction of a farm complex that stood in Cumberland County on land not unlike that of the school district where I taught, and it fell to developers at about the same time Lower Dauphin's farms began vanishing. Tract mansions that cost half a million dollars occupy the site now. The replica is on a 1/16 scale and includes the barn, the milk house, the summer kitchen, the spring house, the silo, the chicken house -- all the buildings that are the heart of a working Pennsylvania farm. I enjoyed looking at it but I certainly couldn't spend as much time studying it as I would have liked.

On my way out I stopped for a while to watch illusionists Buffalo and Brandy. I'd never sat so close to such performers before. I watched Buffalo's hands carefully, especially when he manipulated the magic rings. When Brandy opened the box into which she'd plunged swords (that also presumably went into Buffalo's head) I looked hard at the place where his head should have been. I know that the secret is all in the way he holds the rings and the way a false back changes one's perception of the depth of the box, but I couldn't be certain exactly how the illusions were achieved. Buffalo and Brandy seemed like ordinary, likable folks who might just as easily have been elementary school teachers as show people. Before I left I sat down with a sticky bun (another Pennsylvania German delicacy) and made notes on them as characters for a story.