MY YOUTH OR CHILDHOOD

I forget how many theme parks I have been to but I remember the rides. It could have been King’s Island in Cincinnati or Sandusky’s Cedar Point, maybe the big one just over the line in Wisconsin from Chicago. Whichever one it was they claimed the world’s largest, fastest coster with steel wheels on steel tracks. We took two turns on it. The vibration and shaking were so violent I felt my teeth trying to come out of their sockets. The noise was deafening and hanging on to the lap restraint was not a rule to enforce, rather an exercise of self preservation. Then the rattle and clatter started to even out. The steep ups and downs gave way to long, rolling sections where the steel-on-steel roar slowed down to discernible clackety clacks and you realized the ride was about to end. For me, an old adrenaline junking, I had had enough. But later in the day my kids talked me into another bone rattling go ‘round. What I remember about the second time was anticipating the clackety clack of the slowdown and silence when the safety bar came up. I still love the speed and G-forces but I only ride the nylon wheel & tubular track models now. 

So maybe it’s not so strange I associate these last days of our Colorado excursion with that roller coaster sensation. Near the end, only two days away and it’s the clackety clack of Murphy’s law telling me that no true fun comes without bumps and bruises. For every unblemished delight there will be unanticipated consequences that either hurt or cost too much. To amend a long lived axiom I might say, "sh*t still happens but so does love, fun, laughter, coffee and cherry limeade."

I can feel the wheels easing down to the last ‘clack’ and a long, hopefully uneventful ride across Kansas. I don’t mind the driving but I’ve never been one to feel great about coming home after an adventure. It takes a few days to decompress but it won't be long before I start studying maps again. Marcia Ball’s song, Saint Gabriel is a lament about a woman wrongfully imprisoned. One line goes; “all the sad songs about leaving, not about coming home.” I always thought the sad part was coming home. it should have been, “all the glad songs about leaving". But then my ‘Leaving’ home has never involved incarceration.  

No complaints here. We will hang out with our friends from Evergreen, CO. Then I drop off Sharon at Denver International and she flies back to Louisiana. When I get back to Missouri I’ll learn how my tomatoes have survived the heat and how big the brown spots on my lawn have grown. I have plenty to keep me busy. Decompressing isn’t really decompressing, just a few days of clackety clack and a new idea will hatch. In the August heat I can always go make sawdust in the cool of my basement wood shop. 

Georgetown, CO; you have to look up at a 45 degree angle to see the horizon which puts the sun down behind the peaks early and the temperature goes down with it. The summer 'Cool' that comes with altitude is something I will miss. Squeezing the sweet out of something good is a talent I have preserved, even enhanced. Another song comes to mind, Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music,  “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could. So somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good.”