Why are you smiling?
Ten years from now, they will have this conversation again but he will barely be able to contain his seething contempt for her and for his decision to hitch his wagon to this.
So laugh while you can, pal. It’s only amusing for another year or so.
Read MoreA primal absence in my childhood.
I loved the Fair when I was a kid. I would stay there all day if allowed, riding every ride and spinning my brains and guts into utter madness, pausing only to fill my face with twenty different types of spun or hardened sugar. My favourite ride by far was the carousel. Boring, I know, but I was simply in love with the beautiful, stylized horses. You would study them as they glided by, carefully choosing the most beautiful one, and then race to get to that horse before any other child. Clearly, they were just picking horses at random. I had studied these beasts and made a considered decision. I had to get MY horse.
The lowest point of misery at a fair had to be the day that the carousel was packed, the lines were long, your mom’s nerves were shot from herding children who alternated between screaming in joy and vomiting on strangers, and you ended up having to sit on the carousel bench. This was no kind of carousel ride. No horse, no gentle up and down as we race around in circles, and forget the brass ring. You would sit there in misery, eyeing the horse you had chosen, once a revolution hearing your mother insist “See? You’re having fun!”
While most of the other rides represented fun tinged with fear, or often vice versa, the carousel represented fantasy. This could be my horse, from the stable at my magnificent house where I live, surrounded by servants and various diamond encrusted household items. The beautiful painted horses made all this seem possible, if only for a few minutes. I could be a princess. I COULD.
But I knew nothing of the monkey carousels.
Had I known about the monkey carousels, everything might have been different. Arriving at the fair and being presented with the option to ride a wild primate would have changed everything. The monkey carousel is a totally different ride. It takes you quickly through the childhood phase of fantasy and imagining castles and servants, and you arrive, still in the body of a small child, at the mental age of 17. The monkey carousel opens doors to the heady, exciting combination of imagined wisdom, feelings of immortality, idealism, newly discovered sources of booze and a not yet fully developed frontal lobe. YOU HAVE NOT LIVED UNTIL YOU HAVE RIDDEN THE BACK OF A FIBREGLASS MONKEY!
The monkey carousel would have brought me closer to who I am, who I needed to be so much faster.
I mourn the absence of the monkey carousel in my life.
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