The Cyclone

I’m confused about the difference between euphoria and euphorbia and I always have been.

One of them is poisonous to humans and dogs, though it can be used for certain types of skin cancer. The other is a state of absolute joy which I tend to avoid at all costs as it makes me anxious.

I think it’s the feeling that you have when you are in a roller coaster creeping up to the very top of the first hill and the car is kind of lugging up that hill and your heart is in your throat because you know in the next second you’re going to go tumbling down an incredibly steep track at 1,000,000 miles an hour.

 

My sister Olive and  I used to love to go to Playland at the beach in Rye, New York because they had the Cyclone roller coaster. Playland was a place that every kid wanted to go to particularly at night. Our mother loved taking us and it was our favorite family outing. Frankly, from the moment the car stopped our mother had no idea where we were, but that was nothing new. It was hard to keep track of a band of six kids .

We would go every year with the rest of my family, even though we weren’t tall enough yet to go on the Cyclone, we pretended we were.  We  pretended we were satisfied with the stupid boats that went around the water tunnels in the dark and things jumped out to scare you. We pretended we liked buying foot-long hotdogs, and then throwing them at each other. We wandered along the small alleyways and looked into the different places where you could risk all your allowance, trying to hit a bottle with a fake ball that never hit anything.

 But the Cyclone…now that was something to yearn for. One year I was a tiny bit taller than Olive. I have no idea why. When we pulled up to the measuring ruler, the man there said to me “Well you can go “ and then pointed to Olive and said ,” You are  still too short.”

 In that moment, all the joy was gone for me. Believe it or not there there was no way I was going to go on that roller coaster without Olive. What fun would that be? I looked over to where she’d been and she was already gone assuming I guess that I would be on the roller coaster. I took my slippery quarter and put it back in my pocket and went to buy some cotton candy.

Oddly, I never told Olive that I didn’t go. I don’t know whether it was from embarrassment, guilt, or a weird sense of protectiveness.

Next year, I acted like it was just a piece of cake having done it before. Olive was taller than me again and she stayed that way.