This past weekend I was at the Montville Fair in Montville, Connecticut. I spent the entire weekend there, having rented a space with three other authors as we continue the endless battle of getting our books "out there".
The Montville Fair is not a large fair, by any means, but it was our first one as a group and I think it provided us with a good idea of just what being a vendor entails. My children were excited about going to the fair with us... for days I heard them chatting about the rides they were going to ride and the friends they would see that they haven't seen all summer.
Friday they accompanied me in the afternoon and once we got there, disappointment quickly set in... some of the rides had failed inspection so the entire ride section remained unopened, disappointingly, for the entire night. Despite this, there were quite a few teens and young children running around having a good time, playing and watching the fireworks towards the end of the night, and before we knew it, we were heading home.
Saturday dawned a warm, sunny morning, which was a good indication of the heat which would be enveloping us as the day progressed. In the early afternoon, some of the rides finally were running, which made the fair-going children very happy (especially mine!). After a 15-hour day and much sweating over our books, we headed home, once again exhausted.
Sunday morning began cool and refreshing, the coolest day by far of the three, which was a wonderful relief to all the fair's vendors. A shorter day than Saturday, the weekend finally came to an end and we began breaking down our tent and putting our things away. When we were almost packed up and ready to leave, my cell phone rang.
I looked around with a confused look on my face... all the people who would possibly be calling me, my brother, my boyfriend, and my children, were all there with us.
"Hello?" I answered.
"Hi," an unsure male voice replied. "I'm at the Montville Fair and we found a camera... can you check to see if you're missing yours?"
I quickly grabbed my backpack and looked in the compartment where my small, orange Samsung camera had been. Sure enough, it was there.
"I have mine," I said. I remember thinking that the mysterious caller might be someone playing games with me, but the stranger soon said something that made me glad I hadn't followed my urge to hang up.
"We found a camera here at the fair and we looked through all the pictures in it until we finally found a cat's picture and we got this number," the caller said.
I didn't understand. How had they gotten my number from a picture of a cat on the camera?
"There's a tag," the male voice continued, "and we got two numbers off of it."
He rattled off the numbers... the first was my neice's phone number from when she lived in Connecticut with us about four years ago (she now lives in Florida), and the second was, indeed, my cell phone number.
"I don't understand," I said, looking at my brother and the rest of our group with a confused look on my face.
"In the camera there's a picture of a cat wearing a name tag. We zoomed in on the tag until we could read the phone numbers on it," he said.
Ragu! I thought. One of our two cats wears a name tag that has both mine and my neice's cell phone numbers on it.
"Where are you?" I asked excitedly.
"At the information booth," he answered.
Being about 150 feet away from the booth, I immediately made my way towards him. A young, dark-haired man with a hat and a yellow shirt was standing at the information booth with his back to me.
"I'm behind you making my way towards you," I said and hung up.
As he turned around and looked at me I could see the camera in his hand.
It was my daughter's.
"That's my daughter's camera!" I said, still wondering how they managed to find my cell phone number. He showed me the picture on the screen... sure enough, my cat's name tag on his collar had been zoomed in on. Just as clear as day, the entire name tag filled the camera's screen.
I thanked them and made my way back to the rest of the group, still struggling with the fact that these strangers had found the picture of Ragu with our numbers on his tag. Even more suprising to me was the fact that they had been honest enough to return it to us.
I brought the camera to my daughter and asked her if she was missing something. After being at the fair all day, she admitted that she'd lost the camera sometime that morning. I gave it back to her and told her to go thank the people at the information booth for finding it and being decent enough to return it to us.
My daughter and I would like to thank the good-hearted people from the Montville fair who turned her camera in, and to those who took the time to search frustratingly through ALL of the pictures in the camera for some clue to its owners...
THANK YOU!
