equines.

The signs vere placed every block or so, on opposite ends of the downtown street. They were white with moveable black letters, such as you might buy to announce your church barbeque or a sale at the locally owned jewelry store. I was lacking any device that said "megapixel" anywhere on it, so I had to make due with the camera on my cell phone.

"No equine on Main Street except for parade."

Before Saturday, I'd never been to Benson. So maybe it's the kind of town where that sign needs to stay up all year long, to remind the citizens to keep their horses and mules and donkeys to the side streets unless there's a parade on. Then it makes one wonder how many parades there are a year, and whether you have to register or sign up or if you can just throw yourself in there, provided you have a hoofed work animal to ride upon. My favorite part of the sign is the word "equine," because you look at the citizens of Benson and wonder how many of them know what it means. But then you know that it was chosen because the sign originally said "horses," but all these people with mules and donkeys felt they had the right to trot up and down Main Street, regardless of parade status. Someone in the Benson Town Council owns a thesaurus.

The fourth weekend in September is Mule Days in the town of Benson. Someone might ask why a festival about mules exist, and the only answer I can come up with is that some other town was already celebrating acorns. The sad part is that other towns do host Mule Days, and one in Tennessee apparently attracts over 200,000 mule-lovers annually. Poor little Benson, North Carolina only gets about 60,000 mule-lovers. (The official Mule Days web site states that they get between 60 - 70,000 visitors, which seems like quite a wide range.)

I decided that I wanted to go to Mule Days because I had nothing else to do, because I am Southern, because I am charmed by small town weirdness. I've been to a lot of such festivals. I can't say that there is really a lot of variety between them, but I enjoy them just the same. I like being outside and eating overpriced fried food that is bad for my blood vessels. I like looking at the various vendors of crafts, and I like buying things that I could never find anywhere else. I like being surrounded by friendly people in good moods. And Josh shocked me by loving me enough to go with me, because, really, Mule Days? Sounds like a waste of a Saturday.

Mule Days was pretty much what I expected in terms of festivals. We sat in the park and ate barbeque ribs while listening to a bluegrass quintet play old church and country favorites. We looked at the vendors and debated on whether to buy a Mule Days t-shirt (we decided not to). I wondered if my dad would think the statement "If it ain't half ass, it's just a horse" was funny enough to risk wearing a t-shirt bearing the word "ass." The biggest difference in Benson's grand festival was the smell and the fact that you really needed to watch where you stepped.

We got there in time for the last 3/4 of the parade, where lots of equines were free to roam Main Street. The parade halted only minutes after we arrived, but no one moved. What were we waiting on? Why weren't we proceding to other mule-related festivities? Josh and I navigated through the throngs on the sidewalks further down Main Street, where we realized that a train was coming through town and directly crossing the parade route. Apparently no one in the Benson Town Council owns a train schedule.

While we waited on the train to pass, a chubby ten year old boy stopped to talk to the people in front of us.

"You seen my momma?"

"Huh-uh. She ain't been 'round here."

"She h'ain't? I gots to quit this. I been runnin' up and down the street a-lookin' for her."

"Oh, well, honey, there's yer momma, right 'cross the way."

My skills are not up to reproducing the words as well as I would like, but I was startled to realize how strange this conversation sounded to me. After all, I had grown up listening to exchanges like this. There is likely video or audio tape of me participating in such conversations. I already knew of the existence of the word "h'ain't." Here in the South, we like to give our apostrophes a workout. But I'd been surrounded so long by people who were much less country than I that I'd forgotten what English could sound like in a small southern town. Was I horrified? No. In fact, I was strangely pleased that such dialects continue to thrive. Somehow, it's part of my heritage, and though it reeks of ignorance to big city folks, it's just another culture.

Finally, the train passed, and we were able to catch a glimpse of the rest of the parade. I can honestly say that the Beson Mule Days parade is the best parade I've ever seen live. But perhaps that was only because of the relative lameness of the Christmas parades of Lenoir and Blowing Rock. Josh told me about the Macy's parade in New York, but does it have a rodeo man on a mule riding on a horse trailer cracking a whip?

Now, I can't say this is exact, but I've concocted a short recipe for creating your own Mule Days parade.

Ingredients:
A dozen classic American trucks
3 high school marching bands
2 cheerleading squads
Half a dozen road buggies
2 dance troups of 20 - 60 little girls in tap shoes dancing to techno remixes of bluegrass songs
2 dozen beauty queens of a range of ages with various cheesy titles in fancy convertibles borrowed from local doctors, pharmacists, and lawyers
A vintage McDonald's truck featuring long-forgotten advertising and Ronald McDonald
Any golf carts lying around
3 pickups blaring gospel music, advertising local churches
6 Shriners dressed as clowns with silly bicycles
A dozen classic tractors, one of which should have "Old Rusty" painted on the side
A dozen small carts pulled by shaggy, half-pint ponies
All the equines you can find, with riders of every race
60 - 70,000 spectators

Line spectators up along Main Street. Make sure they have to stand close together so as to best mingle their flavors. Mix the remaining ingredients well. There will be many more equines than anything else, so just shove them in a big group at the back. Teach the beauty queens to wave (elbow, elbow, wrist wrist wrist). Send equine/queen/tractor mixture down Main Street between lines of spectators on a sunny fall day. Wave. Holler. Enjoy.