Fun Times Growing Up

Recollection of Fun Times in My Life 

  
  I have many memories and they provide the foundation for my soul.  One memory is of the Fun Center-part of the Rose Festival, every year. Residents count on the crews to return and take over Waterfront Park, in downtown Portland.
        At the Fun Center, some of my favorite rides have been the chain-linked chair ride that sends you swinging out into space as the ride spins you around and around.  My all-time favorite is the Ferris Wheel, especially when your carriage stops at the top and (providing your other passenger doesn’t rock the carriage too much), it is as it should be: silent and peaceful, looking out over everything. . . .

        Some other fun times . . . Weekend breaks when I was a camp counselor at age nineteen, a group I was friends with went to the coast, Seaside, with all of its fun video games and arcades and that beautiful carousel. . . .

        Other times, when I was younger I went with friends from my small, "elite" high-school choir, to the portion of the northern Oregon coast that allowed driving: we drove along the beach, at night. . . . Feel the "Bump! Bump!" below us.  “What are those?” I thought . . . "people’s sand castles being demolished.  A heavy car—not afraid of things that go 'bump' in the night!"

        At another time, I went to the coast, with a fairly-newly-formed church college group, from the town my Mom lived in, with a couple people and old friend I knew well, but with a number who were new to me.  It was a time where I had some lingering depression with the darkening days of fall, and with recently performing one of my first times on guitar, at an open mic, and all the ambiguity and mixed feelings of good and  bad you feel when you first start performing.  But throwing the football back and forth, venturing from below, up and over the bunkers, seeing winter trees from the top of the hill. . . . my spirits lifted--with the fun and the beautiful sunset I took a picture of after all of us had posed from behind the Peter Iredale wreckage-some climbing up it a little: but this iron framework was the perfect-dark-foreground with late-sun shining through--dark purple and blue mixed with the orange and yellow brightness that came from behind the wreck:  Those that were there were all of us, as they call it: we were "sharing life together."