I walked away from the corkscrew slide with my brain still spinning as though it were scrambled for breakfast. Twisty things don’t go down well with me. It was the second slide, however, that nearly concluded my day. It was one of those tall carnival slides where they give you a burlap sack and you ride it all the way down and off the end onto a padded landing. Fun stuff. I love rides! But the two drops at the end—the first connecting the slide to the final flat part, and the second where the slide ends and the padding begins—were two kicks to my spine. Lovely.
My family went to the San Diego fair yesterday. I’ve not joined them for the past couple of years. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy fairs. The fried food, the art, the convention halls with all of the vendors trying to hock the latest junk. And the people watching! Boy is the fair a great place for watching (and judging) my fellow humans. Likewise, I enjoy time with my family. We genuinely have fun together. We like each other. We’re like the beginning part of a movie where everyone gets along right up until the inlaws arrive. Except we like our inlaws too. Win-win.
But I haven’t gone because I can’t do rides, and rides are about 95% of the day when you have a young child, which we do. My lot, therefore, is to walk from bench to bench where I can guard our ever-growing bags of snacks and drinks and souvenirs. Again, I like rides—rides just don’t like me. I have lifelong vertigo, which has led to motion sickness, and I had to give up the thrill of roller coasters and swinging pirate ships and looping tracks long ago.
And the worst part? The fair doesn’t believe in placing benches in shade. Maybe it’s against their religion, I don’t know. But it makes long summer days feel like even longer summer days. And so the past couple of years I’ve stayed home.
Buuut—and here’s the important part—I regret it every time. That otherwise lovely time to myself when I can read for as long as I want, play games, go for walks, write, or watch scary movies, is spoiled by the fact that 1. I miss them, and 2. These are my son’s formative years and I’ll be absent from some of his great bonding moments and memories.
So I went this year. It wasn’t easy. Those hot, hard benches upon which I spent most of my day did a number on my aging bod. But in between, I spend some great time with my son. When we bumped into some friends, they slipped me an all-day ride pass, so I even got to go on a select few with him. The ones that didn’t twist, the haunted houses, the log ride, the fun houses, that tall slide.
Sure, that one fun house with the twisty slide got me feeling nauseated, and sure, that tall slide did a number on my back, and sure, I got a bit too much sun, and sure, my butt might be bruised from those damn hard benches—but I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world.