Going to an amusement park with my dad wasn’t just an outing. It was a psychological case study in real-time. If you were a behavioral scientist, you’d have taken notes and slipped him your card. If you were a thrill-seeker, you’d have been mildly offended. And if you were me? You’d have spent most of the day pretending not to be related to the guy pacing near the ride exits, muttering about faulty engineering and human error.
To Dad, every ride was a death trap carefully designed to lure in the unsuspecting. Take The Wild Mouse, for instance. For those unfamiliar, this ride was essentially a bite-sized roller coaster-smaller cars, tighter turns, with twice the chaos. The speed combined with the abrupt, jerky movements made your stomach flip like a pancake. That was before the sharp corners that made you feel like you’d be flung into the parking lot.
Everyone else on the ride? Screaming, laughing, having the time of their lives.
Dad? Eyes narrowed, arms crossed, already predicting the one in a million chance a car would go careening off the track. If that ever did happen-despite years of engineering, maintenance checks, and the thousands of successful rides before ours-he wanted to be there to say, “See? I told you.”
But his paranoia didn’t stop at The Wild Mouse.
The Scrambler? That door was going to fly open and catapult us into the next county.
The roller coasters? Those were whiplash-inducing, spine-snapping lawsuits waiting to happen.
The Ferris wheel? It would definitely break down when we were at the top, leaving us stranded like doomed adventurers clinging to a faulty rescue helicopter.
The food? Forget it. For the price of a funnel cake, he could buy enough groceries to feed a small village.
His idea of the perfect amusement park experience? The couch, for a nap with golf on the TV.
Of course, despite all his complaints, he still came along. He still held the camera while I ran to the next ride. He still grumbled about ticket prices while fishing in wallet. And in some weird, roundabout way, that was how he showed he cared. Because for all his rants about safety hazards, he never let me go to the amusement park alone.
It wasn’t just about the rides, it was about spending time together. Even if that time was spent with him making mental calculations about structural integrity while I screamed my head off on a death trap.
And honestly? That’s a memory worth keeping.
Listen to Episode 54 of Welcome to the Suburbs on our website https://suburbspodcast.com/ or your favorite platform, 🎧 like Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s3-episode-54-were-at-loggerheads-with-dress-codes/id1669816704?i=1000688509771
