Summer’s end is supposed to revolve around lazy days and last minute adventures. These are supposed to be days of baseball and bike rides, teary beer bottles and flaking sunburns, all accompanied with the syncopated hum of locusts, mosquitoes, and air conditioners.
For my husband, our eight-year-old son, Joshua, and myself, the end of summer proved none of these things.
Instead, our summer ended abruptly on July 18, the day our contractors showed up to repair the damage cause by a leaky roof that needed a full replacement as well as the drywall in our guest bedroom and foyer. The following week, the transmission crapped out on my 2007 Chevy Aveo, a repair that would drag on for another two and a half weeks.
Bills piled up around us like fall’s leaves, essentially signaling an end to Summer 2015 -- making it the summer that died in July.
Despite all of the problems, this past weekend remedied all that. Jobs and school and schedules and unpaid bills be damned; summer shouldn’t end with the drum beats of hammers on your roof and Netflix in the basement, I vowed.
So in a moment of Clark Griswold-inspired fatherhood frenzy, I packed up my husband and 8-year-old son, grabbed our family friend David (Smith, MileHighGayGuy columnist and owner of Stonewall Fitness) who is an expert on rides and roller coasters, and drove to Lakeside Amusement Park for a sun-baked Sunday in the shadows of suburban Denver.
Lakeside represents a lost monument to summers past. It’s dusty and decrepit, with peeling paint, and rides that groan and rattle like the bones of an aging athlete. Trees and weeds, growing through the skeletons of rides long-abandoned, have overtaken a good fourth of the park.
Lakeside looked like us: exhausted.
And yet.
We climbed into our first ride, The Whip, the oldest still-functioning ride in the park. Vaguely reminiscent of an old-timey Tilt-a-Whirl, the giggles and screams that erupted from our son started at his toes and burst from his lips with such unadulterated joy, that I swear it echoed throughout the park. The giant gears sent our pod clattering and clunking around the corners that shook the old boards at the base awake just as it stirred up the ghosts of summers past for one more spin.
“That. Was. Awesome!” Joshua exclaimed afterwards.
To paraphrase Monty Python, suddenly summer, like Lakeside itself, wasn’t quite dead.
Up next, the old Cyclone coaster with its wooden rails, worn seatbelts, and rickety, whitewashed structure enthralled my son to no end. The first lurch forward sent a shiver down my son’s spine. His hands squeezed the handlebars that had locked us into our seat together. The wind rushed by as the coaster picked up speed, clacking and clanking up the rail. The first twist and subsequent precipitous fall sent screams of terror erupting from my son; he was somewhere between hysterical panic and pure exultation.
“I thought my skin was peeling off!” he blissfully exclaimed afterwards. “Let’s do that again!”
And again we did, and with other rides, too. The Satellite with rockets where Joshua could control the up and down movement proved a favorite. Bumper cars. Bumper boats. The carrousel. The Dragon. The Chipmunk. The Spider. Ride after ride after ride went by, until time slowed, and summer breathed again with long, slow, and steady breaths.
Alive again, summer sang.
We dined on stale pizza and nachos coated with golden gooey cheesy perfection that had been ripening for months. We gulped water and sodas. We lathered on sunscreen. We rode rides two or three times spinning ourselves silly. We basked in the glow of summer’s end.
On the car ride home, our thrilled little boy, two-weeks into being a big third grader now, babbled endlessly about each ride, exclaiming each one as his favorite before declaring Lakeside as the best thing in the world.
That night, after we had tucked our son into bed, my husband and I sat on the sofa emotionally exhausted and, like our bill-inundated bank account, thoroughly spent.
Parenting can sometimes leave you like that, of course.
But you know what? Our family’s summer felt old and broken until this past weekend, overwhelmed by an old and broken roof, soggy and sagging drywall, and a car’s transmission on a mission of failure. 2015 looked like the summer that never was.
At least until Lakeside’s old bones stirred summer back to life. Suddenly, we realized that, like the Satellite ride, we could control our own up and down movements, and Lakeside magically let us soar as a family into a summer sunset as memorable as an eight-year-old’s best time ever.
Well done, Lakeside. Well done, old girl.
