Size DOES matter

This afternoon, I transported several thousand dollars' worth of artwork to a gallery. See, that sounds more Important than "I dropped off a couple of paintings downtown for my brother today." This also means I get to attend the opening reception this weekend, where I will drink wine (and will do my best to refrain from filling my pockets with cheese) and mingle with people who know a whole lot more about art than I do. Hopefully, I'll get to talk to Tardist's and my art teacher, some thirty years later; I will still call him "Mr. Michmerhuizen" unless he strongly insists otherwise (I'm just weird that way with teachers - even after becoming an instructor at the same institution, it always felt disrespectful to me to call my former profs by their first names).

It had somehow escaped my attention that this week is Coast Guard Festival, which is the closest to full-town hysterics that Grand Haven comes every year. The fireworks on the Fourth of July are a token display here; they save the best of the Boom Booms for this first week in August. Coast Guard Festival is whatcha call a Big Hairy Deal around here, always has been, and downtown GH was bustling with revelers, celebrating all that watery and boatish stuff. My parents always hated Coast Guard Festival, because of all the traffic clusterfuck, but for the kids, it was the week we waited for all summer. Several blocks on the waterfront were always shut down so that a carnival could be erected there, and its call to the children of Grand Haven would drown out that pussified Pied Piper any day of the week. I lived for that midway, and would visit as many days out of the week as I possibly could, even on days when I didn't have any money to spend; there was just something about the cheesy rides and the crappy games, the sights and sounds and smells of the carnival, that was intoxicating to me. In fact, it still is, and I try not to let a summer go by without at least one nighttime stroll through a fully lit midway.

With that in mind, I left the art gallery and headed down toward the waterfront, the better to get my first glimpse of Grand Haven's annual carnival in over twenty years. It was only a few blocks to Harbor Drive, and I found myself eager to get there and have a look at the stage dressing for so many pleasant dramas of my youth. So why wasn't I smelling cotton candy and popcorn yet?

A parking lot. My carnival had been condensed, like milk in a fucking can, and deposited in a parking lot. Harbor Drive was fully open to traffic, and there were four or five rides, no games, no awful food, just the rides crammed together in the parking lot next to Porto Bello. My disappointment hit the perfectly manicured sidewalk and sounded just like a thousand Tupperware lids snapping shut on a thousand childhood memories.

Crap.

I might still make a half-hearted foray into town at night for some pictures of all those rides lit up; my ulterior motives might include dinner at one of the restaurants downtown where I can get something other than fish and chips (that was for dinner today, and my tummy is not well pleased with me). My carnival may have shrunk to pocket size, but my appetite has not.

When I die, I'm convinced there will be a mile-long nighttime midway waiting to greet me. Until then, I guess I'll settle for Carnival Lite.