This December, Jeanne and I decided to use her drawing of a carousel horse for our annual Christmas card, which is something of an odd choice. We’ve often been drawn to carousels in romantic places, like the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, even after our children were grown. With students, we generally stayed at the Hôtel de la Sorbonne, next to the University and near the garden. We loved to sit there, with a glass of wine, and watch other people’s children waving from the vintage carousel, or sailing their toy boats in the Medici Fountain.
But our earliest carousel, and the most emotional, was the ancient Cafesjians Carousel at the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul. We lived in Minnesota for five years, 1961-65, while I was teaching at Hamline University. By 1965, our four children, Perrie, Peter, Gretchen and Timothy, were ages 6, 5, 3, and 2. We had zero bucks, and Como Park was a common, and free, destination, complete with a lake and a zoo. The first time we got all of them on the carousel I was holding onto Tim, the youngest, and when the music stopped we got off and found Jeanne, camera dangling, tears streaming down her cheeks. Seeing them bobbing on their horses, she’d seen the future galloping, carrying the children away. We never got the photo.
In any park we visited, when the kids heard the tinny notes of a carousel through trees or around buildings, their ears would prick up like a pony’s, and off we’d go. Another word for carousel is “merry-go-round,” but the usual music often seemed more spooky than merry to us. By now we’ve seen enough movies set in carnivals, where the thin carousel tunes seem to be saying, “Watch out, don’t buy that ticket!”
Once in a while, coming back from a long trip, waiting for our luggage, having visited our children overseas, we’d look at the conveyor belt as the various bags wobbled by, and have more or less the same thought: “You know, this is a carousel, too, except it brings things home.” Language is funny.
My favorite Broadway musical (and I love Broadway musicals) is Carousel, the story of Bill, the doomed carnival barker, and Julie, his working-girl lover. It was the second Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration, after Oklahoma, though we first saw it in the 1950s as a movie starring Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones. The hit song was “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” but the one Jeanne and I liked best — probably foreseeing all our kids — was the long “Soliloquy” Bill sings after learning that Julie is pregnant, imagining the great future of his son or daughter. We’d often semi-sing (like Bill), looking at our newborn children, “but he” (or she) “wouldn’t be president if he didn’t wanna be.”
What about our Christmas card? Well, Christmas has always been about children (by extension from the Child). Carousels are like music boxes, magical Christmas presents that outgrew their box as in a fairy tale. They were once wild unrideable horses, I’d tell the children, but the princess loved them so much she asked the magician to let her ride them, promising him her jewelry, except for her gold ring, if he could do so. So he charmed the horses into the first carousel and hung her gold ring on a pole near the spinning ride; and the princess rode and rode, as her hair turned from red to grey, leaning to catch the gold ring as she whirled by, but it was always just out of reach. Well, that wasn’t the only ending, of course, because there were many children and many horses; and language is funny. Merry Christmas to all.
This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2014.