Brick on a stick

It's hard to express to non-Minnesotans how important the Minnesota State Fair is to natives. You can kind of calendar your life by looking back on it, remembering when you were old enough to go by yourself, gawking at cute boys, keeping a list of the classmates you'd see (one year I remember seeing at least a dozen). For a while, the video-game arcade was the most important thing there, for a while it was the Midway.

You can donate money to the Fair and then engrave whatever you want on a brick to be laid in a memorial area there. A few years back, I had one carved for my friend Ann, who used to go to the Fair regularly with me and who died in 1995 at age 28. Every year that I get back for the Fair, we go visit her brick.

Here's an article about the bricks and the many different memories they carry.