sketches of a summer carnival
just a few notes
This piece begins almost a hundred years ago — ninety-seven years ago, to be exact — and I imagine it begins with a few firemen deciding they’re going to get their horses together, pull a sleigh through a late-summer cornfield and call it a carnival.
Something like seventy years later, my parents and grandparents take me to that carnival, which now has a ferris wheel and a tilt-a-wirl and a merry-go-round and candy apples. Or maybe the carnival always had candy apples, even at the beginning. But, when you’re six-years-old it all seems so huge, it all has a definite vibe. Children, unfamiliar with the world and its definitions, pick up on vibes better than desensitized adults.
And then, this year, I finally took my son to the Sharptown Firemen’s Carnival. The metaphorical merry-go-round has come around.
I took my son there because this is a pleasant passing of life, not that he’ll remember it. But at two-years-old, he’s getting close to that threshold and I want his memories to be bright. I want them to be of lights. Just like my own early memories of this place. And I’m constantly thinking about that, looking down at him and thinking: what does this look like to him?
In that sense, it’s helpful (as a writer) to have a toddler. Without definitions, a toddler experiences the world in raw unfiltered reality.
To have the vibes beamed directly into your head. At least that’s the idea of sketching, which I did as soon as I could at the carnival. While Katie was waiting in line with our son for a funnel cake, I got this down in my notebook:
The sky over the carnival is pale blue in the dusk and the clouds are smears of pinkish gray. The first thing you notice are the lights, first the lights on the rides, contained in huge barns but with their barn doors thrown wide-open so the lights spin, on the merry-go-round and the tilt-a-wirl, spinning all over the sky and the lights shine stronger as the pale blue softens to purple in the night up there. And then there are the lights of the huge bingo stand, a tin-roofed caravel with boards painted red. Inside, the lights on the prizes: impersonal dolls and junk along shelves. The lights of the huge ferris wheel at the far end of the carnival. And beneath the lights, the people. A crowd of unchanging happiness on faces. Children darting through the crowd and teenagers, promenading, betrayed only by their nervous smiles. The ground is dried-out brownish-green grass and it’s under the lights too.
So yeah, that’s the spontaneous sketch. It’s not much, but the point of a sketch in writing — as in art — is to pick up a vibe. And I’m not totally disappointed with it. But this isn’t about art, it’s about the carnival. And it’s not about the carnival, not really. It’s about comfort in this stage of life. It’s about this — about leaning my forearms along the railing outside the caterpillar ride, my hands dangling from my wrists beside all the other dads in the same posture.
A carnival isn’t really about a carnival, you see. It’s about happiness. Ninety-seven years ago, when those firemen kicked this thing off, they couldn’t have seen what was coming. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea from Aristotle’s Ethics, about how happiness is the only thing we chase for its sake alone. We chase money or fame or relationships or whatever because we think those things will bring us happiness. But a small-town carnival throws all those middlemen out the window, this is a pursuit of happiness for the sake of happiness alone.
That’s why the Sharptown Firemen’s Carnival keeps going in Sharptown, a town of 691 people according to the 2020 census. Not because they need it but because we all need it.
Anyway, there’s not much else to say. So here’s a few pictures.
