Amusement Park

This takes me back to the days of wooden roller coasters and tunnels of watery love; the sensation was familiar, bubbling up from childhood memory as sort of scary, sort of fun but you do it anyways with a wish that it turns out alright.  What happened was that one of the elevators was working, but completely without light.  The fluorescents in the elevator ceiling were kaput mortem, noticeable as soon as the metal door opened.

In a hurry, I got on and wondered just how dark it would get in there, and found that out as the door slid shut, winking out the light from the hallway like a sundown in Hades.  Pitch black, the only efforts of luminescence were the red dot on the button for the desired floor, and the also red LED numbers that floated above, hanging in the dark, counting the floors as the box descended.  Good lord, what if someone else gets on, and they are creepy?  What if the darn thing froze, as it does at least once a week?  Aren't I scared of the dark?  What on earth was I thinking?

But something felt familiar and strangely comforting, and then I got it...I was back at Crystal Beach in Ontario, Canada; an amusement park from the 30's located at the clearest, cleanest quartz beach on Lake Erie.  The elevator, as it whirred towards ground floor in an enclosing darkness took me back to the ride through the crazy house, called Laff in the Dark.  You sat in a wheeled car on tracks that sparked, near-crashing into papier mache devils and snakes that sprung out, emitting high pitched screeches.  The car took hairpin turns, rattling you into whoever was crammed into the split vinyl-cushioned seat next to you, ran over bumps in the track, smelt like electrical wiring getting ready to combust, and was great, ratty fun.

I was quite happy when the elevator door opened into the lighted foyer, like Dorothy walking out of her dark, sepia-toned farmhouse into the gardens of Oz.  Errands took me back and forth plus a trip to the library, and I got to ride the midnight elevator three times today.  I brought out the iPhone, which has a nightlight app that causes the phone's screen to blast out enough illumination for me to find my way down the apartment's darkened hallway before reaching the chain for the ceiling fixture.  I use it after turning out everything else so I don't step on a lounging cat who thinks hell, I can see in the dark, why can't you?  It provided a ghostly glow in the elevator, not worth the battery power, so I shut it off and let myself drop down the 100 feet to ground level.

But what if I were the sort that was terrified of the dark?  So close your eyes, silly, and pretend that you are really in the light but only with eyes shut.  I tried it, hoping to remember to open them before running into a neighbor.  It didn't work, because having eyes closed in the dark Is Really Dark, compared to closing them in light, where you get that orangey-glow and other colors from through your eyelids.  Experiment over, me becoming an expert at riding in the total dark was burgeoning even though it truly is a worthless talent, unless in some circumstance someone is with you, and you have to be the sane one because they are freaking out and trying to climb up your ribcage.

That was the biggest adventure of the day; the second was that I found out that you can actually take out a non-circulating book from the library's closed stacks with Special Permission.   This event was super great, for I can scan the interesting pages into the computer instead of fighting with obstinate, sullen copying machines and worrying about public domain which I think is allowed on this particular text anyways.  A good friend and I went to the Farmer's Market in the snow, finding some lovely Brussels sprouts, remarking on how this area has gotten only 17 inches of snow so far, compared with the usual 52 by this time of season.

The daylight is growing slowly into greater length, it's not dark at four in the afternoon which means we have turned the corner in our own hairpin of winter solstice.  The dark is a comfort, full of blankets and stars, circling planetary revolutions, and cats curled into sighing balls of fleece.  Sleep, that lovely restorative, comes and shelves the daylight nonsense and lets you fall, fall through layers of dark, into rhythms of breath.  Good night.