Not All Fairs Have Roller Coasters, More's the Pity

The Seventh Fleet pre-deployment fair was this afternoon. I haven't had so much fun working a room since College Night at the high school last fall.

Come to think of it, they were remarkably similar events: an auditorium lined with a dozen or so tables stacked with enough flyers and pamphlets to decimate a rain forest, two or three people desperate for any form of human interaction sitting behind each table, and three or four "customers" wandering around the open space in the center of the room.

Forty faces lit up in unison when I entered that room. I am not exaggerating. Were I slightly less mature, in fact, I might have been tempted to scoot back out the door and repeat my entrance just to savor that little frisson of pleasure those welcoming smiles evoked. Well, okay, I was tempted but I flicked that little cartoon devil off my left shoulder and set out around the perimeter.

He hasn't left yet and already I'm counting the days until the next deployment so I can make another circuit of that room. But next time I'm going to comb my hair first and try to make it all the way to the exit without volunteering for half the worthwhile organizations in Japan.