It was May Festival Day at Northside Elementary, an annual celebration and fund-raising event that children, teachers, and parents alike all looked forward to year after year.
Each class, with the help of a veritable army of PTA and other volunteers, set up a booth or game, in or near, each of the classrooms, and for a token sum of money you could play, or ride, or purchase some handmade arts and craft, or edible treat. The activities and other delights of the festival ranged from tractor pulled hay rides around the playground, to carnival type foods and games, to a general assembly where there were announcements of Classroom Baby Picture Competition winners, May pole dancers (colorfully dressed children that danced to music in and around one another while holding long satin streamers until they’d wound them all the way down the pole), and ultimately the crowning of a May Festival King and Queen – typically the winners of the 6th grade boy and girl baby picture competition.
The festival went on rain or shine, so you always hoped for a clear day, the day of the festival, because otherwise everything had to be moved indoors and it was just much harder for everyone to get in and around in the classrooms and hallways. It was still a fun event, regardless, but things were definitely better when the skies remained clear. (It probably only ever rained about 10% of the time, the day of the festival, but there was no such thing as a weatherman that could actually predict the weather, with accuracy back then, so we never knew for sure which way it will all turn out until it all actually got underway.
Most of the games cost anywhere from a dime to a quarter to play, and with our family of nine (when everyone could be there), we were a high contributing crowd. You might say, Northside had our hearts – and most of our money too – at least one day in May every year.
Aside from things like a hayride, or pony rides, or once in a while a Cowboy that brought his long horn steer in for the festival, all the way from Texas – and which you could get up really close to, and even try to touch, if you were brave enough – there wasn’t anything about the May Festival that very closely resembled the big, glitzy, carnival-like events you find these days, but it was just a simpler time, back then. We didn’t know what we were missing, so we didn’t miss any of those things.
We also didn’t know to be afraid of strangers or much of anything else, so going to the festival with our family was about like this: We all ride there in one vehicle – often my Dad’s pickup truck – and since there were so many of us, and it was mild weather, most of us kids rode in the back of the truck – all the way there, flying 70 miles an hour down the road. If my Dad’s truck even had seat belts, they would, obviously, have only been inside the cab, not the bed of the truck where all the kids were, and beyond that, I can assure you that even if they were seatbelts, there inside the cab, no one riding in there was wearing them either!
In all truth, we really weren’t afraid of much – certainly not of dying (if our actions told much of our actual thoughts for the future), and so we generally all arrived together, then everyone would jump out, and scatter – like ants under magnifying glass in the sun.
My younger sister and I didn’t yet receive an allowance. That was something I shrewdly negotiated for us a bit later on in the timeline (the telling of which, will have to be left for another day), so we voluntarily checked in with my folks fairly routinely, not so much because they worried about us running to and fro freely and without chaperone – it was our elementary school campus, after all – but rather due to the fact that that’s were the apparent (to us at least) unlimited sources of wealth for playing games and buying festival stuff resided…in my Mom’s purse and/or Dad’s pockets.
I personally check in frequently and often.
One year at the May Festival, when I was in about the 4th or 5th grade, I remember one of the classrooms had a cakewalk as their class’s fund-raising game. For a quarter, you could take a chance and walk the line – the cakewalk line, that is – where you’d marched around on a giant, chalk outlined, circular, numbered pathway while music was played. When the music was stopped, if the number drawn randomly from a hat, was also the same number as the one you were standing on, you won, and got to choose the cake of your choice from the cake table as your prize for landing on the winning number.
My mom loved stuff like that. Her eyes would twinkle, and she’d have this sort of impish smile, just at the possibility of winning – so of course she was happy for any, and/or all of us, to show up and play the cake walk game too while she was trying to win, since for more of us to play, it meant our family automatically up’d its odds of winning a cake that would go home with us. Maybe to her, that was enough…that we’d get to take one or two of those yummy looking cakes home with us and all get to enjoy a slice – but early on, I realized there was something in me that wanted to personally win a cake. I needed to win one of those cakes!
I forget the fine details, because it’s been so long ago, but the best I can remember it, the sequence of events went something along these lines: a handful of us were there, all playing at the same time, and we had one or two go arounds, and one of us ended up having our number called and won a cake. Maybe it was my Mom, or one of the others…honestly, I can’t tell you. I just know that when someone won a cake for our family – I’ll call it our family cake – at that point, and for some unknown reason, it became incredibly important to me to personally win a cake. I was a kid. I loved cake. I loved all sweets…, but it was somehow more than just wanting something sweet to eat. I just really, really wanted to win. So, I prayed – that my number would be called, and I’d win a cake – and I did. At that point, I was hooked!
I think it was because I was as surprised as anyone that I had won, and it made me sort of curious at the timing of it, like could there have really been some sort of connection between my silent prayer for a personal cake win and the actual event of having my number called…? Hmm, I needed more data. So, I walked the line again, and prayed again – and I won again! Weird! …and even to a child, it seemed highly improbable – and so I refused to stop my data collection process. I walked the line again, and again, and again, and I prayed every single time. I didn’t win every single time, but I did win four cakes before my folks cut me off and we had to leave.
Technically, I don’t truly know why we quit playing that day. Maybe they were down to almost no more good-looking cakes, or maybe it was getting late and my folks were truly running out of cash, or maybe all the other players (who kept losing to me) were starting to give my parents the stink eye… I’m not sure. All I know, is that I never even noticed what anyone else was doing. I only noticed how my personal cake prayers were seeming to be working, and I kept wanting to let the good times roll.
At that time, my family wasn’t big on a whole lot of church attendance. I think my parent were well intentioned and had tried to herd us all off to church as a family when we were all younger, but with there being so many of us, as we grew, it just became more and more like trying herding cattle. Plus, both my parents had full time jobs and so the weekend was the only time when they got even a moment to themselves, to rest up from the stresses of life, and work, trying raise a large family, so as time passed, I think it just was harder and harder for them to get us there – sometimes we made it for an Easter service, or maybe for Mother’s Day, but beyond that, it became more of the exception than the rule. So, by the time I came along, the little bit I understood of church, and things pertaining to God, was very little indeed. I certainly didn’t understand prayer – the purpose for it, how to pray, or even why you would pray. I heard things at times – either from my parents, or maybe a Sunday school teacher (from one of the times we did visit), or even a kindly neighbor, say things like, “You should always say your prayers before you go to sleep at night.” but I didn’t really know anything about God, and certainly nothing about the right way or wrong way to pray to Him. So, in true childlike fashion, not suspecting there was a right or wrong way to do something that occurred to me to try to do, I prayed as I saw fit. ‘Couldn’t hurt! I wanted to personally win a cake, so that is exactly what I prayed for…and I did win one, and then another, and another, and another…four in total.
I have since then, in the nearly 50 years since I won four cakes at the festival that year, come to believe even more strongly than I did then that God did answer my prayers to win those cakes.
I believe it, not because I think He had to, or even that He had any reason to do so other than perhaps just to show a young lost soul – me, at that time – a little glimmer of hope. The Bible talks about God not even hearing sinners’ prayers, and what I think that is talking about, is like how as loving parents, we often must turn a deaf ear to some of the cries and complaints of our misbehaving children – not because we literally cannot hear them, but because it’s more important for their long term good, that sometimes we intentionally not attend to such cries. Essentially, I believe God is in no way obligated to listen to, or answer, sinners’ prayers, because the Bible teaches that, but He can… He’s God. He can do whatever He chooses to do.
That’s not to say I think He’s capricious – or prone to random changes or mood swings – nothing in the Bible suggests that. Instead, I think it’s more like we just don’t really understand Him all that well.
But if you were to believe – as I do – in a good God – like a good One – then it’s not a hard thing to then also think that that kind of God might also actually be really kind to people that don’t even deserve it, and He might just do some things that He really has no obligation to do, simply because He’s so good and generous. Consider, for example, how He makes the sun to shine on everyone – the good, the bad, and the ugly, how He’s given us oxygen to keep us alive. We don’t have to pay for that. (Name me one other person you know, who’s ever just given you, of the goodness of their heart, something that was essential for life, totally free of charge. If you can name any, I’ll wager, it hasn’t been many!)
So, while I don’t think there was really any humanly justifiable reason for God to hear my little, lost child, prayers for personal cake victory that day at the festival, I do very much believe in the existence a very good and loving God. One that could – and I believe sometimes does – do very unexpected things for our benefit that He doesn’t have to do – perhaps because it’s what might just help fan even the tiniest of sparks of faith in us, to trust more in Him.