Song of the Day: And many fantasies were learned on that day.

It is one of the final nights of summer, refreshingly cool and clear and caressed by gentle breezes. I don’t remember my exact age, probably 13 or 14.

The Fulton County Fair is coming to a close and I keep running into my classmates, getting in one last night of carefree fun before school starts up again in a couple of weeks.

The lights of the carnival seem a little brighter, a little richer than they do nowadays. And I am still under the impression that carnival workers are these creatures living a magical existence. I don’t yet smell the beer on their breaths or the distinct aroma of marijuana wafting out of the trailers they sleep in. Their tattoos are still really cool, not blurred and faded and gross. I haven’t yet discovered carnies are kind of skeevy. A little pushy, perhaps, when they try to get me to play their games for the magnificent prizes (I’d later learn that Carnival Plush is the cheapest, shoddiest kind of stuffed toy you can get.) And unlike telemarketers, you can’t hang up on them.

I meet up with Max and Ed. We go over to the Crane game. Nowadays, it’s a common moneygrabber everywhere from grocery stores to children’s pizza places to arcades. But in those days, you only saw such a magnificent machine once a year, at the carnival.

We quickly expend our supply of quarters in it. We scrounge together a couple of singles and hand them to the carnie, asking for change. He hands us ten quarters. Ten. Being honest folk, we question him and make sure it isn’t a mistake.

It isn’t. He does it to everybody. He knows he’ll get them all back anyway. Simultaneously, lightbulbs go off in all our little heads.

We hunt up their mom, explain the situation, and she gives us some more singles.

We return to the Crane, get change again, and don’t put it in the machine.

“We’ve got to play at least one game,” one of us points out. It might have been me, I don’t remember, “so he doesn’t figure out what’s going on.”

We settle on each of us playing one more game. A quarter apiece. On that quarter, I win a cobalt-blue, cowboy-boot-shaped shotglass. I slip it into my pocket and will later pack it away with my other magical totems – an arrowhead, an 1892 dime I found in the garden, and the like.

Then we decide to get a soda. Even back then, I was a cheapskate. One look at the prices charged for sodas in the concession stands and I suggest we go over to the city-owned soda machines at the tennis courts, adjacent to the fairgrounds.

We get the drinks, sit and talk awhile. About how the summer was too short and what the next year at school will be like, how things are changing and we are changing with them. Important stuff.

Then we return to the carnival. We walk past The Swing, a big, creaky-looking contraption on which riders sit on swings, rotating around a central point faster and faster until centrifugal force pushes them out so the chains on the swings are almost parallel to the ground. We stand almost directly under them, gaping up at them in amazement. The attendant has tuned the blaring radio to Z-93, a rock station from the small college town of Batesville.

The lights are sparkling again. The breeze is blowing. The times they are a-changing. I have the distinct feeling that this is a special moment in time and right here, right now, in this moment, life is good and I should cherish it because it will never, ever be this good again. At least not this good in this way.

And you know what? I was right.

And this is the song that is blaring out of The Swing.