At The Beach

Pontchartrain Beach. Those were the days. I tell ya. Summer evenings spent walking the midway, riding rides and playing arcade games. The innocent laughter of a sixth-grade girl-friend as Seals & Croft harmonized “a little music from the house next door” on the Music Express ride. And everywhere the salty smell of the lake subtly mingled with cigarette smoke and extraordinary whiffs of cotton candy.

We had it jack back in those days. Every summer meant Bible School at our church, and if you kept a perfect attendance record for the entire week, the reward was a youth trip on Saturday to the amusement park located in New Orleans East. The park is gone today, a victim of changing times, but the memories of it are blissful checks I’m allowed to draw on a bank where I no longer have an account.

I loved the roller coasters; the Zephyr and later on the Rajun’ Cajun. I was scared of the Wild Maus but rode it anyway so as not to let on, despite the rumors of two, four, six, (sometimes eight) people supposedly losing their lives during previous fateful forays on that precarious example of German engineering long before my time. And most of all, I held a special place in my heart for the cryptic ride known as the Haunted House. It was hokey, and not really scary at all—positively B-grade movie horror at its best. But it was the perfect place to demonstrate your courage in front of that sixth-grade girlfriend, and possibly a gateway toward earning a stolen kiss—if your timing was right.

You stood in line across the front of the building, usually across both sides depending on the crowd, and one side of the building had a fake cemetery (at least I think it was) replete with several tombstones draped in Spanish moss. Each marker told a tale meant to impress the passersby, stories of lost lives and the dubious deeds performed by those supposedly interred there. Over time I have forgotten most of the quotes, but one I can still recall today due to the fact that during my younger days I had no idea of what it actually meant:

Ma loved Pa
Pa loved women
Ma caught Pa with two in swimming
Here lies Pa.

What did ‘in swimming” mean? I had no clue back then. But it was a tombstone, and the inscription is supposed to be your last testimony—the thoughts you want others to remember you by. Pa is remembered because he refused the love of Ma and preferred instead to love other women. And, after Ma caught him with two “in swimming,” she laid him to rest here in front of a goofy carnival ride. What a legacy! Love him or hate him, he was just being Pa.

I’ve thought about that a lot as I’ve grown older—not about Pa and Ma, but about my own tombstone I’ll sleep under one day. What testimony do I wish to leave behind me for others to read about down through the ages? “He was a good father.” “He loved his wife.” “He went to church on Sunday.” “He worked hard all of his life.” Those are all good and I think I’ve done my best to fulfill those testaments, but then again, so do many others. Those things are expected of all of us and to perform less than admirably in those convictions would lessen you as a person. You can readily sum all of those up with “He did what he was supposed to do.” That may be enough for some people, but to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the convictions we believe in most when we’re young are hills we scan our future from, yet when we are older they can easily become the caves in which we hide.

Paul wrote his own epitaph at the end of his second letter to Timothy, and it is one I choose to do my utmost to aspire toward: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith:” That may not be as interesting as Pa’s last line, but in the way of convictions it covers a lot more mileage when all is said and done.