During the past weekend, long-time friends in Pennsylvania have reminded me that this is the week of The Bloomsburg Fair -- an annual event held in Bloomsburg, PA (where I lived with my family and taught mathematics at Bloomsburg University for a bunch of years). Public schools in Bloomsburg started their fall classes a week early so that students could have vacation-time during Fair Week -- held near the end of September. The fair brings farmers and gardeners and cooks and other creative country folk together to show their products and it was easy for me to get involved since I lived just a few blocks from the Bloomsburg Fairground. Moreover, Pennsylvania county fairs were familiar to me from my childhood. I grew up on a farm near Indiana, PA -- home of the Indiana County Fair, in which my father participated by exhibiting crops and animals and which I attended to enjoy Ferris-wheel rides and other carnival entertainments.
One of my celebrations of this fondly-remembered Bloomsburg event was to write a poem entitled "The Bloomsburg Fair," a poem with bits of math. Here is one of its stanzas.
A team of guessers,
Myrtle and John,
take dollar after dollar
from gamblers who suppose
they look a different age.
Myrtle peers deep
into a bettor's eyes,
then guesses on the nose.
Mistaken once. A midlife couple
asked the number of their wedded years.
Though Myrtle said "Eleven,"
it was "One." A missing digit.
Two years back,
when Mother was seventy-eight,
John guessed, "Seventy-three."
"Kind to old folks," Mother said.
This poem by JoAnne Growney appears in the anthology, COMMON WEALTH: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple, (2005, PSU Press). The entire poem may be found online at this link.
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