BRASS

Got this one sketched out and realized it reprises a portion of an earlier post, but I hope with more texture and nuance.  The topic is important enough to me to say to you as many ways as I can think of.  Don't feel cheated. Thanks for checking in.

Took the kids to a small-potatoes amusement park last week, Knobles Grove.  You may know the ubiquitous radio ads if not the park itself.  It's up in coal country, an easy 40 minutes from the homestead, by which I mean hunting ground, by which I mean parents' house.  I'm in my 40's and home still feels like someplace I gotta go to get to, not depart from.  Don't get me wrong, I never feel truly at ease or even that I'm where I'm supposed to be unless H and the kids are with me, and the last year or so has gouged that into sharper relief for me.  BUT, like Dorthy learned, there's just no place like home.  And for what that's worth, I think the north country is growing on my kids this way.  Camp Potter really is a place to stretch your legs, find a project, read a ton, cook a big meal, watch the sunset, listen to the thrushes, catch a fish, shoot a turkey, nap under the sound of rain on a tin roof or stitch together some workout with pull ups and car pushes.

But I digress.  The amusement park.  I grew up going to Knobles.  Once or twice a year someone— parent, neighbor, relative—would organize a trip.  This is where my fast ball was clocked at 49 m.p.h. a feat I have been unable to live down in 28 years.  Great bumper cars, decent haunted house, hideous food (but in a comforting way), and wooden roller coasters.  It's got a retro, throwback feel.  Like say a '30's depression carnival.  Quaint, little homely, fiercely independent.  You buy tickets for the rides.  Tickets!  It's rather like an anti-hershey park.  The old-timey carousel with scary-looking horses has a hundred-year old, deafening steam organ and if you go around on a perimeter steed, you can snatch at rings offered to the riders from a telescoping, mechanical arm.  Once per ride someone pulls the brass ring, a little bit of hoo-ha, a pat on the back, small moment of personal triumph, next group please.   It's a pretty easy thing, grabbing the rings, but it's made somewhat challenging or at least anxious by the RIGHT-NOW element and the lurking idea that if the ring doesn't come free your arm will be avulsed from its torso to hang bloody from the telescope.  You gotta out-rig your horse and ride almost side saddle and something about it feels death-defying to a kid.   The rings are steel and most, most, most of the time you get nothing but steel and when the ride is over you lob the steelies back into the mouth of a lion painted on canvas over a receiving bucket.  Getting the brass ring, well that's all luck of the draw but i've seen it missed, so, yes, luck, but you still gotta perform.  As it happens, my first time, at maybe 10 years old, I got the brass ring.   AND I got it again, in high school.  A sweet salve after getting roughed up by the radar gun.  You can't give your crush a fast ball, after all.  Has any other human being ever snagged the brass ring twice?  Seems silly to even ask.

On the Monday of my prodigal return to Knobles I'd had enough of the kiddie, round-they-go-take-a-picture rides and led us all over to the Phoenix, wooden roller coaster par excellence.  The closer we got to ride time, the more times we got to see ride-done cars pulling into dock, the more fear started to worry the faces of Wyatt Agnes and Adeline.  You can stay as buoyant and carefree as you want, but when a kid makes up his or her mind about what is going to be fun and what is going to suck, all your overly-enthusiastic smiles or doubtful looks are not going to dissuade.  So: Five of us, a ride away, screaming patrons, screeching wheels, a loudspeaker gargling (important?) instructions.  My three decided this was going to suck.  Additional problem: 2 to a car.  Wyatt, sorry, has to ride with stranger guy—totally cool and avuncular, but completely unknown—one ride cycle ahead of his family.  It'll be fine, just wait for us on the other side.  Another person might have reconsidered, thought through a different strategy.  Or just listened to his wife.  I am not another person.  Nope.  Wyatt, go with strange guy, you'll be fine, time to fly little bird.  Ags, with me.  Ads, with mom.  It's gonna be FUN dammit.  But I confess to feeling like a LCVP tailgate guy, Utah Beach.

Wyatt goes off with stranger danger and the forlorn look on his face must have been the look of all those poor orphans they shipped out west on trains 100 years ago. Welcome to Nebraska, kids, the tableland. Click Click Click up goes the coaster train.  SCREEEAAAM, down goes the coaster train.  Welcome to the Phoenix, you can't rise from the ashes without first burning to cinder. The stricken look on Wyatt's face upon return pretty much vaporized whatever thin thread of courage remained with the girls awaiting their turn and now desperately pleading to be manumitted from the orphan train and its awful master.  I gave the boy a big, searching, suggestive, thumbs up across track.  Thumbs up? Thumbs up?  Thumbs up, right?  He looked at his sisters and his sisters only and like Nero must have to other gladiators about to die, gave a unambiguous hell-ward-pointing thumb.  Last thing Heather does is give me an eye roll so large and aggressive I got a little woozy.  Last thing Ags says to me before the bar comes down trapping us in our death cabs:  Im only doing this 'cause you're making me.

Doubtless you love a good wooden roller coaster ride as much as I do, all shaky herky-jerky and sudden.  Well, the Phoenix does rise again. And again.  I had my arm firmly around Ags to lessen the violence, but, sweetheart, it's a wooden roller coaster.  She couldn't hear my comforting talk for the abject screaming the whole trip.  At some point the g-forces sucked the chewing gum from her mouth into her long hair.  Adders screamed as well except when abrupt changes in direction closed her teeth on her tongue making it bleed and making her parents out to be some kind of criminals.

And for a brief moment I might have thought about or regretted not being another, softer guy.  But what we were dealing with and what this blog post is about is fear.  See, we had this moment, Wyatt and I—in Maine—fretting about jumping from the boat into the icy Atlantic.  And then we had another (still in the middle of it, actually) having to do with the contact part of football.  And the girls and rock-climbing, and swimming and the list goes on. . . to include wooden roller coasters, the deep end and hell, even the dark.  No one's out to raise cowards.  No one.  I know that.  I'm trying to turn the screw even tighter by teaching my kids how to confront, to deal with, to live in the presence of fear. So they rode the Phoenix at gunpoint or close to it.  Football is actually another good example.  Most kids when they start pee-wee don't know how to hit.  They're afraid of contact.  And with good reason.  It just runs counter to everything they've learned in their life up to that point.  Run into something as hard as I can?  For what?  What about "be careful, watch what your doing, you're gonna get hurt?"  Nah, those are off the table now.  Sic 'em.  I remember very clearly liking being a football player WAY more than actually playing football.  I liked the gear and the esteem (it was central PA)  I didn't like the contact.  I was afraid.  Eventually, we got a good coach who taught us how to hit, gave us confidence and what I feared I soon embraced.  I'm trying to be my kids' good coach.  One of the beauties of football (there aren't many, but this one goes a LONG way) is that it will make lots of room for someone small and slow. . . if they are fearless.  In this way it is much like life.

See when I was going to die, I was gripped by a hollowing-out, blinding fear.  Racing pulse, panic, constantly on edge, unable to reason or see past the next hour. Sleepless. I have very little memory of this time, save the fear.  I feared heaven because the idea seems painfully boring.  I feared hell because it seems boringly painful.  I feared simply ceasing to exist because, well, this one doesn't really need an explanation now does it?—and that oughta tell you something—but who leaves a good party in the middle?  The thing is, I didn't die as soon as I thought I might.  I just hung around dreading moment to moment.  Terrific, paralyzing dread.  You have known real fear: it is work.  It's exhausting.  You breathe hard, you're contracted and tense.  Here's what happens if you stay in that heightened state too long:  you wear out, you get tired, you see the state for what it is—just a state, that you can ignore.  I'd like to claim some epiphany, a cloud-parting moment when I realized some secret, touched the rail, or solved the riddle.  I can't.  I didn't.  I just got tired.  Tired of being afraid all the damn time.  I couldn't keep it up.  I had to go on living.  Even if living meant dying.  I finally saw that you can choose not to be afraid.  It is not gravity or something ineluctable.  It's not even an emotion, though it often comes in emotional costume. It's plain and simple a choice we make.  Sure, sometimes something will give you a start, take your breath, catch you unaware.  But honestly, even that doesn't happen to me much anymore.  Guess it's why a roller coaster offers such appeal, even more than before: Thrill, virtual, play-pretend fear.  I'm not really afraid anymore.  Im just not.  You don't have to be either.  I know I could get sick again.  I could.  In fact, right now, the odds are I will.  Those are the breaks.  But I'm not afraid.  Not of dying.  I was. Terrified.  Sobbing, dreading, tortured and beggingly afraid.  Mainly, I think, because I didn't know how to.  Die, that is.  This was the great gift of my ordeal: I learned how to die.  I had to, I was out of options.  But I didn't die.  I don't know anything about being dead, but I know about dying.  To die you have to be humble and thankful and accepting but you also have to be brave and resolute and trusting.  The lesson I snatched from the arm of eternity is you gotta be these things to live, too.  The better you get at all these things, being thankful and humble and brave and trusting, the easier your life—and death—will be.

So what I feel emboldened to teach my kids and tell you is that fear is poisonous.  It's an energy sink and a waste of time.  Bad things are gonna happen.  So are good.  Those potentialities are in tension and constitute the pith of our time alive.  Fear is only a force coupler for the bad and a dilution of the good.  Rid yourself.  Go about your business, unafraid.  Im not talking about being reckless or stupid.  I'm talking about choices that are easy to forget are ours alone to make.

At the end of the Knobles day we stopped at the carousel.  When it was our turn I was at the back of the pack.  All the horses filled up, namely the perimeter horses, from which one can try for rings.  Ah, I thought, I'll just help with the kids and ride inside, standing next to my horse.  But something pulled me back.  I waited: behind the gate, first person in line for the next ride, while everyone else I was with went around.  Heather gave me a look like....you can imagine the look, and I deserved it.  But you can't get the brass ring from the inside.  Everyone dismounted, exited the ride.  I went in with the new group, picked an outside horse, feisty looking, flowing plaster mane, spiraled pole shooting out his back, one hoof tucked as if initiating a jump.  My party waited outside for the 43 year-old to finish his fake pony ride. Steel, steel, steel, steel.  Four steels rings.   Do I have to name alloy of the fifth?  Does ANYONE know ANYONE  who's claimed three brass rings in a lifetime?

You do.