Carnival

"It's a city carnival ride. How bad can it be?" I thought, ignoring the ominous yellow sign stating, "WARNING: This is a thrill ride producing in excess of 2Gs of force," and warning young kids, pregnant women, people with heart problems, and anyone with common sense not to ride it. After all, my 8- and 9-year-olds had just gotten off, and they seemed to have suffered no adverse effects. I thought my 8-year-old might have had a look of terror on his face during the actual ride, but I couldn't be sure--he was spinning too fast to get a good look at his face--so I decided it must be okay. Besides, my wife wanted to ride.

Yes, it's city festival days again, the time when you trust your life to guys who put large spinning machines together in two days. Sure, most of them look like you wouldn't trust them with your lunch, let alone your life, guys to which every parent with a teenage daughter would bar the door, but that's all part of the fun, right? Luckily, the operator of this ride looked older than the doesn't-look-older-than-13 operator of one of the other rides.

As the ride began to spin, my wife told me how much she used to enjoy this ride as a kid. I, too, enjoyed a similar ride, but as we pick up speed, it seems to go faster than the one did when I was a kid. Not likely, as it's old enough to be the same ride. One of the nearby rides is called "Starship 2000," offering, um, a glimpse of what space travel was like in the recent past? Add the fact that the bolts holding this thing together are 40 years old to my list of worries. As the spinning accelerates and we lift off of the ground, my wife notes, "I'd forgotten what 2Gs feels like." I'm just hoping our unit doesn't detach and fly across the street. Still the spinning gets faster, and I begin wondering how long the ride is and whether I will throw up before or after the ride ends. Something about our inner ear changes as we age, and I find it much harder than I used to to go on rides like this without getting sick. I don't remember feeling queasy at the carnival when I was my son's age.

Mercifully, the ride soon ends, and I stagger off, not quite upright. Happily, I don't throw up, but I feel a little woozy for about 30 minutes afterwards and don't ride another ride the rest of the night. My kids, however, loved it, and my wife seemed fine, too, though I notice she decides not to ride the Zipper with our daughter, after all. Later, we see a teenager with his girlfriend who we remember as a young child from a previous Church ward. He apparently doesn't remember us, but that doesn't stop us from talking to him and telling him how we remember him was he was this small, holding up hands somewhere below our waists.

With my wallet $52 dollars lighter, we head home, and we remind the kids that it's late and they need to get straight to bed. I read my son a quick story from a magazine my mom used to read to me and head to bed early myself. It seems I've turned into my parents earlier than I ever would have imagined.