I’ve always prided myself on being kind of a tough guy. Not particularly strong or courageous, but tough, in the sense that I could absorb a lot of punishment and keep going. Lately, I find myself forced to rethink that. It seems that the older I get, the less tough I get, and to add insult to injury, I don’t seem to be getting any smarter in order to compensate for it.

Last friday, my wife, the fun-loving and adventurous Jess and I took our grandson, Austin, age 12, and granddaughter Sharon, age 3 1/2, to the Wayne county fair. It had already been a long day for me, covering the livestock auction for our local paper, where I’m currently employed as the world’s oldest unpaid intern. I got home that evening soaked with sweat and covered with bug bites.

We loaded the kids up and headed into town. We stopped at Clara’s Pizza King for supper, because neither Jess nor I had had anything to eat all day. This was my first tragic error in judgement for the night. Not that there was anything wrong with the food or the service, both were excellent, but it showed an astonishing lack of foresight on my part.

In choosing pizza, we failed to take into consideration my complete inability to know when to stop (and frankly, I blame Jess for this particular failure), as well as the heat at the fair, which was hotter than the hinges on the gates of hell.

Then we went to the fair. When I was a kid, I loved all the rides. The wilder the better, as far as I was concerned. Nothing ever bothered me. I saw no reason to suspect that anything had changed. We started off with Jess taking Sharon on the “Crazy Bus” kiddie ride, just to see how she would do on the rides. Austin and I got quite a few laughs, watching Jess trapped in that tiny bus with about 50 screaming little kids, going up and down in circles. Jess survived, Sharon loved it, and I had no idea how quickly I’d be getting my comeuppance.

Austin wanted to ride the “Sizzler”, one of those old classics where you’re locked into a seat and flung around in circles. Sharon was really disappointed that she wasn’t tall enough to ride. Austin still wanted to ride it, and I remembered that those rides are not nearly as much fun by yourself. When I was a kid, my little brother David and I always rode them together, and since we didn’t have any other kids with us, I decided to be a good Grandpa and ride it with him. Tragic error in judgement #2.

Like I said before, I wasn’t worried. When I was a kid, I loved those freakin’ things. David and I would ride them over and over again, waiving our hands in the air, and trying to find ways to make them even worse. I thought, “Sure I’m older and fatter, but so what? Gravity hasn’t changed. Besides, in the Air Force, I learned techniques for dealing with G-forces. I’ll just put that training to good use, and show this kid that the old man can still be a fun guy.” I wasn’t even fazed by the fact that it was a tight fit (embarrassingly so, actually). I just figured that it would just hold me in place even better, so I could just sit back and enjoy the ride while Austin’s skinny little body would be skidding all over the place.

Wrong.

The ride started up, and I really enjoyed it. For about the 1st 30 seconds or so. The next 2 1/2 hours of the 3 minute ride, not so much. Rarely ever, in a lifetime of being wrong, have I ever been so completely wrong about anything. Austin didn’t skid around, he was mashed securely and fairly comfortably right up against me, laughing like an idiot.

Gravity hadn’t changed since I was a kid, but I had neglected to consider how the changes in me would allow the same old gravity to affect me. I had absolutely failed to realize that the more of me there is, the more of me there is to be affected by gravity (and believe me, there’s a lot more of me now than there was back in my daredevil heyday). My Air Force training was all for nothing. I had thought that the safety rail crushing into me would kind of act like a G-suit, giving me something to push against. It didn’t. In fact, it seemed completely useless. I was wedged into the corner of the seat so tightly that no force on earth could have forced me out, even without the safety bar.

Frankly, it seemed to me that the only purpose it served was to put so much pressure on my midsection that I wasn’t sure which way I was going to lose my pizza, up or down (although if I was a betting man, and I am, my money would have been on both, simultaneously). After about 45 seconds, my neck muscles locked into place from the strain of keeping my massive skull from being ripped off my shoulders (it takes a huge cranium to store all these apparently dead brain cells) by the centrifugal forces, so I couldn’t turn my head. All I could do was sit there with a grimace of pain etched on my face (it’s finally starting to relax), and try to accomplish the near-impossible task of pushing against the G-forces while simultaneously trying to keep all possible exits from my body clamped tightly shut. At one point, I’m pretty sure I lost a partially digested breadstick through my right ear.

Eventually, the giant portable instrument of torture slowed to a stop, and the bar unlocked. I sat there and let Austin get out first. I’ll admit it, I was only pretending to be polite. I just couldn’t move. Austin jumped up and bounded out of the diabolical machine like it had never moved. It took a minute for me to even begin to be able to move. Finally, I mustered all the strength and determination I had left and climbed out, thanking God that the carny had stopped it when our car was over the platform. If it had been over the ground, I’d have never made it down without ending up flat on my face. As it was, my shoe came off, and it took me three tries to get it back on.

The carny came up and asked me if I was ok. “I’ve never seen someone in such a hurry to get off this thing that they walked out of their shoes,” he said. I tried to bluff my way through, muttering something about being fine, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t fooling anyone.

After that, I sicced Austin on the naive and good-natured Jess. Let her entertain the fearless, grandpa-killing little brute. I told her I’d take Sharon over to ride the kiddie train. As Jess and Austin went tra-la-la-ing on their way to the bumper cars, I slowly walked with Sharon over to the train. At this point, I was feeling nauseous, weak in the knees, and was soaked in flop-sweat. Not the usual flop-sweat that entertainers and comedians get when their act is dying, but the kind of flop-sweat you get when you’re in fear of actually flopping over dead. I was not a happy guy.

While we waited for the next train ride to start, Sharon started kind of dancing around. It wasn’t, as I had hoped, the I’m-so-happy excitement dance, but the dreaded pee-pee dance. Of course the only facilities nearby were Port-a-Johns. We had to wait for one of the handicapped ones to open up, because there’s no way we were going to both fit into a regular sized one without me knocking her into the hole. Finally one opened up, and in we went. Now I’ve had to use the bathroom in a lot of unpleasant circumstances, but even I balked at this. Sharon took one look at it, then looked at me and said, “Grandpa, I don’t have to potty.” She’s young, but she’s not stupid.

So back to the midway we went. Minutes later, of course, she’s doing the pee-pee dance again, so off we go, as fast as I could stagger, to try to find someplace where she could take care of business with a minimal risk of contamination. We finally found a clean bathroom in a building about a quarter mile away, where the goats, chickens, and rabbits were kept. Then, it was back to the midway to try to find Jess and Austin.

After searching high and low, all over the midway, we finally found them, about 20 feet from the entrance. Austin had talked Jess into several wild rides, so she was ready to turn him back over to me. That’s when he decided he wanted to ride the loop-de-loop roller coaster. That’s all it is, just a big loop. I said alright, and took him over so he could ride it.

While we’re standing in line, I tell him to have fun, and he says, “You’re coming with me aren’t you?” At this point, I abandoned all pretense at tough-guyness. I said, “Look kid, I’m old, I’m fat, I’m tired, I’ve already had one heart attack, and that last ride almost killed me. You’re on your own.”

Then he looks at me with those big, 12-year-old puppy dog eyes, filled with all the sadness of a child whose hero has fallen and says, “But I’m scared to ride it by myself.”

Well, shit. I’m not made of stone, dammit. Manipulative little jerk.

So a couple minutes later, I’m strapped into this mechanized instrument of death, telling myself, it’s okay, at least this one only goes two directions, forward and backward, and it has to stop before it can change directions. I’m telling Austin, “If I puke, I’m puking on you.”

And then, we were off. Once again, I quite enjoyed the first few seconds, but that quickly faded into a repeat of the “Sizzler” experience.

At last, I was right about something. It did stop to change directions. Repeatedly. At the top. Where we were hanging upside down.

I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Those things aren’t safe. Nothing that does that that gets put up in 30 minutes can be safe.” Those people are wrong. I know, because I spent the entire ride praying, “Please God, make it stop, or make it crash, or just take me now, but just please God, MAKE IT STOP!!!!!”

God must have been busy in the middle-east or something, because he was certainly taking no interest in my suffering at that moment. Eventually, the carny took pity on me, or time ran out, but finally it stopped. Once again, it took a few moments for me to collect myself before I could get down from it.

Even Austin had started to get worried about me. After it was all over, I heard him tell Jess, “I didn’t know someone’s head could turn that purple.” Then they laughed and laughed. Maybe he wasn’t all that worried after all.

The rest of the evening is just a blur of staggering from ride to ride, looking for a place to sit and sweat while the kids and Jess enjoyed the rides.

Frederick Nietzsche once said, “What does not kill us, only makes us stronger.”

I feel quite strongly that Herr Nietzsche was full of what I almost sprayed all over the midway. A more accurate saying, I believe, would be, “What does not kill us softens us up so that the next thing that comes along has a better chance.”

Clint Eastwood said, in one of his movies, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” Never forget, loyal readers, those limitations are on a sliding scale, and slip lower as we get older.