Jul 16, 2018 3 min read

My summer is shaping up nicely. Thanks for asking. There has been frolicking and much merriment. Huzzah! No, I’m not spending the summer in Elizabethan England. I’m just excited.

Recently, I found myself floating down the lazy river. It wasn’t a real river. It was water with chlorine and other miscellaneous chemicals in it – like whatever they put in sunscreen. I was on an inner tube. From above, my fellow travelers and I looked like the final spoonful of Cheerios in a giant bowl of cereal. I was drifting through the world like a cloud on a summer breeze. It was fairly easy to leap into that metaphor. The park was called Ocean Breeze, after all.

I was reminded of William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” He may or may not be the first poet to picture himself as a cumulus cloud, but he was the first one I’ve ever read about who did.

Side note: Wordsworth would have never imagined clouds to be lonely if he lived in Pittsburgh. They travel in packs here; big, dark gray packs – like wolves.

But I digress, like I do. I enjoyed bopping around the artificial river in my oversized hemorrhoid doughnut, despite the water hazards. Occasionally, I would veer too close to a waterfall, or I would have to steer away from buckets of water that splashed down from above. They have to induce some excitement, probably to make sure the lazy river riders are still alive.

It is a quintessential summer experience, the most pleasant of the water park’s attractions.

A few moments earlier – before I floated gently down the stream – I was pushed through a dark, purple shaft like a clump of hair in a Drano commercial. I was spat into the water like an old piece of Dentyne before a conference call. It was thrilling and frightening at the same time.

The water park was fraught with peril. I was pushed, prodded and slammed around by the water; in tubes, on slides and in the wave pool. Danger was everywhere!

There was another attraction that resembled a giant toilet bowl. In it, you are flushed out the bottom and into a pool. It’s called the Vortex. I guess you’re supposed to pretend you are an asteroid or some other bit of space flotsam sucked into a black hole.

But tucked away from the madding crowd was the lazy river. It was hiding behind kiddie pools and a snow-cone pagoda, on the other side of a bridge built over a swamp. Across that bridge, I found my Shangri La, my Xanadu (sans Olivia Newton John and her roller skates).

I enjoyed every minute.

Summer brings me back to Wordsworth’s words (say that seven times fast). The last line of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” reads, “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.”

I plan on dancing with the daffodils and drifting down lazy rivers as long as the summer weather holds.