The cow who might go home in a raffle
DIXON, on the calendar if not yet in the folding chairs — Forty years is a long time to keep inviting a town to eat hot dogs and consider livestock as a door prize. The 40th Annual Dixon Cow Days land Friday through Sunday, September 18–20, which is to say the weekend after the woods open to archery and the weekend before anybody has an excuse to be tired of fall.
The public menu is a small-town novel: parade, 5K, car show, youth pageant, live music, a hot-dog contest that will produce at least one photograph no one should enlarge, and a raffle whose prize is a live cow. Promoters have been willing, in print, to float the possibility of two. Sunday belongs to the Dixon Ministerial Alliance, which is how a town remembers that a cow is also a creature and not only a punchline.
Inkhorn will not invent the winning ticket. Inkhorn will not name a heifer who has not been named. What fiction is allowed to do, with the grease pencil watching, is stand in the alley of the imagination and watch a family do arithmetic on a napkin.
Do we have a trailer. Do we have hay that is not already spoken for by the goats. Do we have a fence that will survive a cow who did not grow up on our hill. Do we understand that “free cow” is a sentence with a second clause, and the second clause is winter.
A raffle cow is not a joke to the cow. She is a relocation with balloons.
The goats of Arkatype Farms, who have opinions about cattle as a species and raffles as a theology, asked only that the paper print the dates and the warning that comes with every live prize: tell the neighbors before the trailer turns in the drive. A surprise cow is how a good weekend becomes a letter to extension.
Professor Gruff’s margin: “Print ‘or TWO’ because they printed it. Do not print a moo we did not hear. Congratulate Dixon on forty years of keeping the joke kind.”