A CARNIVAL CRUISE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (06-08-23)
 

     Any cardiologist worth their salt will tell you that if you can stay young at heart, it'll be a lot less work for them. They'll also probably tell you to cut down on the salt. So when the carnival came to our town we leapt at the chance to go. Maybe not "leapt," but I lumbered spryly for someone who is young at heart but old everywhere else. The carnival can take me right back to my fledgling years, when the world was new, everything was possible, and I hadn't yet experienced the cause-and-effect of a stomach-ful of carnival cuisine sloshing around at various speeds, directions and altitudes.

     We wandered around to take in the scene. There was the usual food fare available. Here the word "fried" is a prefix, and "dog" is a suffix. You could page through a dictionary, stick the word "fried" in front of any noun and "dog" behind it, heat up some oil, and you've got yourself a Fried Pine Cone Dog stand, for example. And it always tastes better at a carnival. I'm pretty sure it's all 100% organically sourced. If you buy a hot dog you'll just have to trust that it doesn't contain any harmful ingredients, such as a hot dog. 

     They had some games of chance, where you could win any number of valuable prizes. I chose to throw darts at a wall of balloons, and I guess you were on the honor system that that's where you would throw them. I won a small toy snake, but I could have won something that looked like a stuffed pineapple with ears if I had hit one more balloon.

     There were plenty of rides. They had the one where you stand with your back to the wall and it spins you around so fast that if you should happen to get sick it won't do you any good, and even your worst insults are thrown back in your face. It's like a medical centrifuge that separates the parts of you that have different densities. The densest part of me is the part that tries to understand math, so I guess you could just skim that section off me after the ride and throw it in with the used corn cobs. I was never any good at math, and my fourth grade teacher knew it very well and STILL attempted to teach me. She might say, "Okay class, I've got some new problems today-" "I hate to interrupt, Mrs. Fritschler," I'd interrupt, "but couldn't you just see someone like everybody else? I've got my own problems over here." That's the way I remember it, anyway. It seems that when I recall scenes from my childhood, I've been edited out of many of them.

     There was a roller coaster ride in the shape of a caterpillar, and that's about as scary as I need things to be. Once a roller coaster reaches the pupa stage, I'm done. If the roller coaster goes backwards, maybe it can drop me off at a time prior to when I got on. I can fit into a tea cup ride if it's an extra grande.  Still, there are some rides I can survive. Ferris wheel season is coming up so we got in some practice. I also wanted to see if I could peer into the DeCicco's next door and find out if the deli line was manageable.

     The Ferris wheel has an "Intensity Level" of 3, in case you were wondering. I've never seen Intensity Level readings before, I guess it's something they started measuring because little kids get freaked out on certain rides. I'm not sure what scale they use, but I'm guessing that a yoga class would be, say, a level 1 and a conversation with Jeff Goldblum would probably come in at about a 7. I don't like high intensity myself, and even if I'm watching a horror movie I would rather have two small horrors than one big horror. Or if I'm at a restaurant and there's a bright overhead lamp, I will unscrew the bulb. When I was a kid my brother Mike would pretend to try to push me out of the roller coaster car when it came around a bend, so I could expect to add 40 percent to the intensity level. 60 percent if he really was trying to push me out.

     So, the next time the carnival comes to town, remember that it's a great place to stay young at heart, and if you ever have a medical condition where you need to induce vomiting, who knows, it may even save your life. For me, however, staying young at heart could scare me half to death.