When Baby-sitters Club and Duck Collide

Hi everyone, as I’m sure many of you will understand, I’ve been struggling with the heaviness of, well, everything in the world lately. However, since I’ve been fiddling with this story, which is very frivolous, for a while now, I figured it was time to finish it. Hopefully, some levity can help, and I hope you're all safe and well.

I was reading The Baby-sitters Club one night recently when I had an epiphany: Duck wasn’t some one-off fluke event. I was born to play (and win) carnival games.

Before I explain this stunning breakthrough in exquisite detail, I’ll allow the tension to build for a few moments more while I tell you about the absolutely bonkers thing that happened when Dawn took her two babysitting charges to the fair one afternoon.

As I’m sure you know, Dawn Schafer is a California girl, complete with white-blond hair and an affinity for avocados. She was uprooted and moved to cold and dreary Stoneybrook, Connecticut, when her parents got divorced. I won’t get too deep into the Schafer family situation, but let’s just say it’s messy. Dawn and her mom live on one coast, Dad and Dawn’s brother Jeff live on the other.

In book #23, Dawn on the Coast, Dawn heads back to sunny California to visit the other half of her splintered family. During her visit, she babysits for two kids she used to sit for. Their names are Daffodil and Clover, not just because they are from California, but also because their mom was a hippie in her younger days, who is now a successful weaver. She has three whole looms right there in their living room!

When Dawn arrives, hippie-turned-weaver mom gives the kids some cash and tells Dawn she should take them to the carnival around the corner because it’s a beautiful day (and yes, it’s California, so every day is beautiful). Dawn is inexplicably stoked about this. I can’t imagine anything worse than having to supervise two kids who aren’t my own at a fair, but I guess that’s just me. Heck, I’ve had literal nightmares about taking my own kids to the carnival.

Anyway, Dawn and the kids walked over to the fair since it was conveniently located nearby, right behind the mall. At the fair, the kids flitted about for a few minutes, rode a couple of rides, looked at food, didn’t complain about anything. You know, typical kids at a fair behavior. But, through it all, Daffodil (the older of the two kids) was completely dialed in on the ring toss game.

Right when I read the words “ring toss,” a distant memory started skittering around in the recesses of my brain. I didn’t immediately have time to excavate, however, because I was too busy trying to figure out what in the world was going on with this ring toss game at the local California fair. The younger child, Clover, went first, and she was complete trash; she went zero for six. Then, Daffodil went, and she nailed her first three tosses before missing two of her last three. Four for six. Pretty solid… or so I thought.

The author just glossed right over this, but going four for six on the ring toss apparently won you NOTHING. Suddenly, my duck win didn’t seem quite so impressive. I made one shot out of four while Daffodil over here was tossing rings at a 67 percent clip and getting completely shut out. Not to be deterred by the seemingly impossible odds, Daffodil tried again and went four for six again!

Disappointment was setting in, so Dawn caved and let Clover get cotton candy. Dawn is from California; therefore, junk food is anathema to her, but sometimes you have to live a little. But only a little. Dawn got some vegetable fritters for her and Daffodil to share, as if poor Daffodil’s day wasn’t bad enough already.

This junk/weird food break in the proceedings allowed me to finalize the dredging up of that old memory I’d been trying to latch onto: Polar Bear! How could I have forgotten? Long before there was Duck, like almost four decades before, there was Polar Bear.

Polar Bear was about a one-half-Duck-sized bear that was clearly used, as evidenced by a few suspicious stains, and it was ALL MINE after I won, get this, a ring toss game at the local fair in Florida when I was probably around six years old. The local fair was a big deal in my small town. It was hosted by the Catholic school where the rich children went. They set up a booth in the pine-tree-lined vacant lot next to the school and sold tickets for weeks in advance.

I was both captivated and terrified by the fair. I was never a big fan of rides, but I loved games and competitions. However, playing the games required human interaction, which I was also never a big fan of. I managed to push through my fears on a few occasions, I suppose, most notably when I played the ring toss game and won Polar Bear.

The game was a simple one. There was a large plastic board on the ground with words like “small prize” and “medium prize” printed on it. You tossed small rings on the board, and they bounced and spun around. If your ring landed on the prize words, you won. One ring was all it took, not six consecutive rings. One of my rings landed squarely on the “grand prize” space in the middle of the board. The booth attendant was incredulous. He looked at whichever adult was with me (I think it was my dad), and said, “He actually won it.”

He retrieved the grand prize, the soiled Polar Bear, and handed it to me, a bit begrudgingly. Imagine if that guy could see me now. Well, I guess there’s a pretty good chance he’s dead, but if he isn’t, he’d die of astonishment because soiled Polar Bear plus Duck is just too much luck for one lifetime.

Back to Dawn and Daffodil.

After the veggie fritters and cotton candy (unhealthy!), Daffodil counted out the change in her pockets and found that she had enough left to do a couple of activities. Dawn, being an all-star babysitter, knew where this was heading. “Ring toss?” she asked. “Ring toss,” Daffodil confirmed with a look of steely determination in her eyes.

On her next attempt, Daffodil faltered, scoring only three hits alongside three misses. Not good enough. However, she gathered herself, locked in, and went an astounding six for six on her final attempt. The “very pink” elephant she chose as her prize was certainly well earned.

I almost jumped out of bed and cheered when Daffodil’s final ring hit the peg (or whatever it hit… the logistics of the game remain murky). I was excited for her and for Duck and for my exhumed Polar Bear memory.

I was gratified to learn that some things never change, and that destiny is very much real. And a few days and one book later, I was pleased to discover that even very successful authors write about the same things over and over. Because in book #24, Kristy and the Mother’s Day Surprise, the girls went to YET ANOTHER fair. It was a key plot point in two consecutive books!

The sitters took 21 children to the fair this time around. Twenty-one! That’s a new nightmare unlocked… and maybe a story for another time.

Words by me, Andrew Knott. Best known for duck… and Baby-sitters Club.

My books:

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, mini-golf, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey