Great Adventure

When I was in 4^th grade I went on a school trip to Great Adventure. I had never really been to an amusement park before, so I felt fairly fearless. I easily followed my friends from ride to ride happily spinning and turning on Spiders and Enterprises and Round ups. When approaching the rollercoaster, “ Rolling Thunder” I again comfortably waited in line for an hour, pointing out and passing the posts ornamented with chewing gum like modern mosaics, tributes to American teenage impatience. When my turn came, I naturally took my seat and felt the exhilaration as the car chugged forward, methodically clicking like a metronome up the first hill. For those well versed in roller coasters you understand that at the summit there is a pause and then the descent begins slowly.. One can almost enjoy the view of the entire park for a moment, and then just like the moment of waking from a dream where you are screaming and sweating and falling, you actually are falling and screaming and sweating and falling.

As a child I had a very loud scream. The volume and pitch of my potential and up till that moment completely unrealized scream was not a squeally, shrieky scream, but more of a full bodied amplified harpy scream. I have heard that screaming actually helps equalize the pressure in your body upon such a descent. Whether my body knew this did not matter. All I could feel was absolute terror and with my heart rocketing through my throat all I could do was release scream after scream after scream. I could hear the shouts of my fearless friends yelling at me to stop shattering their ear drums, but I didn’t care. And then it was over..the descent, the screams, the first hill. And naturally, we began climbing again..the metronome clicking, ticking taking us upward. I was shaking uncontrollably, violently. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out.

On the second hill I crouched really low in my seat. I closed my eyes. I felt the pause at the summit and then I took a deep breath and held it as tight as I could as if holding my breath would keep my intestines from flying out of my mouth. The terror was still there, but I had it trapped. Like a bird frantically pecking and throwing itself at the bars of a cage I could feel it flail and scratch, but I held on. I was silent, closed, holding on till the fall ended and then I released my breath and prepared for the next hill. The third hill was much less steep than the first two and I was able to, if not comfortably at least gracefully, weather the rest of the ride. When we pulled into the station I was eager to get out. My friends all wanted to go again. There was another girl who had been screaming as vigorously as I had and was said to have been sobbing on the ride as well. Even she volunteered to go again. I did not.

We are looking at Real Estate. When buying a house there are many challenges, but the first as with any life decision is to know your self. Who are we? What do we really want? Uncomfortably, like the couple in Revolutionary Road we fancy ourselves artists. We believe we want more than the 9-5, new construction, suburbanites. We understand that we need space; space to dream, space to be separate and space to create. For Artists the Dream means having a barn studio on some land separate from your home.

“Don’t you want to live the dream?” The Examiner asks me first, with romance in his voice. We can have lots of land and a studio for you, and for me, and we can set up a print shop. I can almost hear the two for tea music in the background.

“Dreams are not cheap” I counter. Wasn’t this move about scaling back, simplifying?

“Do you or don’t you want to live the dream?“ he then states as a challenge.

“ What about the house? It’s smaller than what we have now. It needs work, more work. When are we going to have the time and resources for the dream?” I answer.

“Don’t complain to me that you cannot be an artist..that you can not create work..” he passionately counters.

“ An artist doesn’t need a particular space, I can make art on the couch. ” I yell back.

“ Well, I need space to make art.” he returns, with passion again.

For 14 years the Examiner has not created art. When we met we were in Art school. He was pursuing his MFA in printmaking and I a Certificate in painting. He left his graduate program to pursue a stable career of public service. We married after he joined the police department and for 14 years he has proudly served as a Police officer. It was a choice I supported and one that I have rethought and reflected upon on several and then several more occasions. When I met the Examiner he was an artist; full of passion, critical aspirations and gnawing insecurities about the place his white male art had in the pantheon of multicultural artists’ statements. Becoming a cop at 34 seemed a more manageable gauntlet for a former marine. The work; the police work though rigorously stressful presented manageable obstacles. The passion once spent on making images sing from a flat two dimensional plane was now vocal, physical, more concrete with easily traceable causes and effects.

People always used to ask me what it was like being married to a cop, didn’t I worry? I never had a true answer to this question until now. Perhaps now that it is over I can, like wives who welcome their husbands home from combat, weep with relief, and I am. He is here. He made it physically intact. His spirit, his soul these will need some mending.

Being married to a cop in Philadelphia is like living with a man who works in a fourth dimension. In the morning he puts on his uniform and drives to the other place. It seems like that place is only 15 minutes away and the streets look like normal streets, the people like everyday people. There may or may not be an economic difference, but that is not the true lens shifter. He gets out of his civilian car, checks in at the station, gets in a police car and in warp speed he is on the street. Not the same street he just drove in on. He is now on the “Other street.” And on this street he is suddenly visible and his perception is tuned into the emotional carnage of the broken, the abused, the unloved, the sick and in some cases the wicked.

In my husband’s first year as an officer a woman died in his arms after being stabbed multiple times. Throughout his career he has talked people off of bridges, saved people from gun shot wounds, negotiated hundreds of family disputes, lectured parents on parenting skills, dented some police cars, shouted innumerable expletives, made acquaintances with teen-age drug dealers, read about their deaths not too much later. He has been spit upon, cursed and withstood insurmountable racism, prejudice and ignorance, attended the funerals of his brothers, and guarded the line at O‘Bama‘s inauguration. He has stood for hours without breaks in the freezing January cold of Mummers parades, directed traffic and held the line on riot patrol at Greek festivals. He has mentored Rookies, taught in the Academy, testified in court and finally put a number of people in jail. This was mostly all before he became the Examiner.

He would talk sometimes with other cops about the sickness of being on the street. The problem with being in that dimension is once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. It is not more vivid or important than the reality most of us as civilians live in, it is just unavoidable. Like a magic trick it can be taught. Don’t you want to see? He would ask in so many different ways. “No, I don’t really want to see, but now that you have pointed it out..I can’t help but see.” And I did, I do see. Early in his career, early in our marriage we saw many and many more petty robberies, transactions and things I did not see before. The sight is wearying. It believes in it’s self-importance and uses words like truth and knowledge to justify its precedence and in doing so clouds the other equally important, equally vivid realities. Thus the knowledge and the truth that empower the officer of the law also sickens him or her.

As a cop’s wife, I worried very little if not at all about my husband’s physical safety. I was never privy to that reel of danger. As for the rest, I worried, I watched and I dealt with it every day. And now, I am astonished, amazed and proud of all that he has made of himself, and finally I am thankful he is retired. I am exhaling and ready for the next ride.

Don’t you want to live the dream? He asks me.

We are making this move to Texas because we have agreed; those equally important and vivid realities; our children, and our creative souls need to take precedence. These are our life boats. After 14 years my husband is asking for the opportunity to make art again and now he shall have the space. Welcome home my love, I can’t wait to meet you.