Carnival

I am locked in a metal cage that is spinning around several hundred feet up in the air. It could be several miles--I'm really bad at distances and measurements--but I don't really want to think about it too much. My teeth are clamped shut and my lips scrunched up together. My legs are splayed, straining for purchase against the metal floor, and my arms are locked in front of me, my hands flat against the grid through which I can see the trees and neighborhood school and the road and the blue, blue sky flying by.

My eight year old son is next to me, and he has control of the metal bar that spins our personal cage around and around even as the creaking, shrieking machinery spins around the wheel we are attached to. At one point I did try to wrestle the bar from his control, but at eight years old and as a budding karate master (he has his purple belt), he has become suddenly, sometimes frighteningly, stronger then me in many areas. Holding on to this bar is one of them. He pushes on the bar even as I am using all my might to hold it back so that we don't spin. And he lets loose a battle yell as our cage turns over, hanging us upside down, as the giant wheel we are attached to spins us into a descending ark.

I want to scream, too, but I clamp my lips even tighter and hold it in, afraid that if I start I won't know how to stop.

All I can think is, I used to live and die for amusement park rides. What happened to me?

I remember my dad telling me, at some point, that amusement park rides were no longer fun for him, that he thought too much about what could go wrong. I also remember thinking, "You are so old. How sad for you. I will never be you."

Of course, he also taught me to "never say never," and recently I've started saying that to my kids.

Only the summer before, while watching my kids go on one kiddie ride after another, I was longing for the summer when my kids would be old enough to go on a "big" ride with me.

Now, here I was, with an eight year old so excited to finally reach the height requirements that he could barely speak, and all I could think of was, "Oh! God! Jehovah! Zeus or Athena! Don'tLetTheMachineLoseANutOrBoltOrAnythingImportant!" I can't even open my eyes, for Christ's sake! I'm not that old yet, am I?

Was that it, then? Had I reached the magical threshold when I could no longer find the simple thrill in freefall?

Maybe.

Maybe, I think as our cage comes out of freefall, coasts across the platform, begins another slow ascension and my son promises not to rock the cage if I open my eyes "just for a minute," maybe we all reach a certain point in our lives when there are so many little thrills we don't need the big ones.

I shake my head at hum and purse my lips. I can't even talk, I am so terrified of all the things that might go wrong.

Of course, the last time I climbed into any sort of amusement park ride, cage or otherwise, was before I had kids. Back then, I didn't care about school bombings or the economy. Pedophiles and kidnappers were bad people, but I was too old to take candy from strangers and, not coming from old or new money, I really doubted anyone would kidnap me. Let's not even get into drivers who thought the neighborhood streets were the Autobahn, schoolyard bulllies, black market handguns or suicide bombers on planes. The bottom line was, if anything bad did happen to me, it happened to me and ME alone (my husband and parents and friends and family--they would have been heartbroken, of course, but they would have survived).

No, before I had kids, the most thrill I got out of my day was when a male friend was late to work one morning and the admin called up to ask me if I knew where he was. We came from different directions, and we took different trains, but the insinuation was that I knew where he was because we PLANNED coming in at different times. You know, like celebrities leave restaurants at different times. Gosh darn it, I said, you figured us out.

I (and my friend) had a lot of fun with that one for a long time.

But in the end, it still wasn't nearly as much fun as whipping around in the Scrambler at Great America, or climbing the biggest roller caoster knowing that two seconds after you're hurtling down at 80 miles per hour, you're going to flip upside down and for a moment, just a single moment, feel like you're flying.

No, before I had kids, I didn't have the daily thrill of wondering if my son would finally choke on his food, he was laughing so hard. Or the constant excitement of waiting for my daughter to flip off the swing and go flying across the patio because she refuses to hold on with both hands. Of course, I also hadn't experienced the edge-of-my-seat tension watching that same daughter, just younger, let go of the couch and walk across the room by herself for the first time. Or the pure trill of elation when my son received a Certificate of Recognition from his school for "displaying great teamwork with his classmates and table group"--teamwork being one of his...ummm....troublespots.

So, maybe it's not age so much as the lifestyle I'm now living. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed. Maybe my thrill-o-meter is full to capacity.

Maybe I'm just afraid that if I think about how all of that stuff makes me feel---really, really makes me feel--I'll start screaming and never stop.

I open my eyes and look over at my son. I don't think I've ever seen his face quite so animated, his eyes so alight with excitement. His smile is so wide it's gotta' hurt. Or does it? I don't remember my smile ever hurting when I was a kid. It only started hurting after college when I had to smile all the time at work.

"Oh man, oh man oh here we go, Mommy, here we go again!" my son yells. He is literally foaming at the corners of his mouth, he is that excited. He braces his legs against the floor, but not out of need to feel ground under his feet, I can tell. Simply so he can get better purchase on the controller-bar. Oh yeah. Here we go again, all right. We're at the pinnacle of the ride again, about to go into freefall, and my son is going to flip us upside down and right side up and every which way in between. He pulls back on the bar and we start to tilt forward.

For a very, very long second we are hanging like that, perpindicular to the ground while the big wheel we are attached to stops to let a rider in at the bottom.

All the bad stuff starts to fly through my mind: the nuts and bolts than can fly off at any moment, the carny not paying attention, the economy, terrorists, the state of our checking account--then we are falling, heading straight for the ground even as my son is pulling back hard on the bar and we are rolling around in a jerking circle.

His screams roar out of his belly like a hurricane, and for the first time, I understand there is absolutle terror beneath his delight. But instead of suppressing it, instead of fearing what his fear will breed, he releases it as easily as our cage is pulled down by gravity.

My stomach flip-flops. Our cage begins its plummet downwards. We are upside down, my ponytail tickling my nose, and even I'm pretty sure I'm going to die, for just a moment, just a single second, I feel like I'm spinning, free of everything, elation and joy co-mingling with the fear until I can no longer tell the difference.

Without the one, how can there be the other?

I open my mouth and, inching my fingers over my son's so we are both pulling back on the bar, I scream.