Turner St Chronicles: Hot Night, Cool Festival

If a heat wave never breaks, can it properly be called a "wave" at all?

We have been enduring a torrid heat spell through most of July. Temps were in the 90s most of the week, and there is little respite once the sun goes down. A backyard slid-n-slide has helped us keep somewhat cool. So has the newly-revamped Connors pool on River Street, which we have frequently visited this month. But when thermometers registered 100+ yesterday, the best option was just to stay inside and give thanks for central A/C.

That is, until 6 pm, when it was time to party outside.

The annual St. Mary of Carmen Society (Italian) festival is happening this weekend, deep among the red, white, and green painted streets of Nonantum. Everyone likes a party, even when it's one thousand degrees outside, so we braved the weather and joined the revelers. I drove over (A/C blasting, naturally) with Andres and Celia. Natalia, apparently immune to the heat, walked there with Lucia.

Carnival games don't change much from year to year. Andres is still too small to do the throw a dart/baseball types, and I won't let him near shooting games (waterguns being the exception). So he and his sister are largely left with a handful of ridiculously easy/mildly insulting kiddie games to play.

My favorite game is the one where I hand a carnival worker $3, and Celia gets to choose a duck from a small inflatable pool, and then she gets a prize. Just so I am clear: she picks a duck, and then she gets a prize. She doesn't have to capture one with a net. Or pick one out of the pool with a fishing rod. This game literally requires no skill. But it's ingenious. It is a very simple way to entice me into a very, very poor financial transaction, in which I hand over $3, watch my daughter grab a duck in less than 5 seconds, and receive a 12¢ toy in return. And what's worse, is that I know I'll do it again when Lucia is old enough to play in a couple years. Ugh.

Andres chose to forego the duck game (yay) in favor of a new activity--the EuroBounce, where he was strapped into a harness, tethered to a couple of poles, and allowed to bounce off a trampoline. With a little help, he was able to rise about 40 feet in the air above us. He seemed perfectly content way up there. We called for him to do some flips and turns (which he has no problem doing around the house or into the pool) but he kept his feet under him on jump after jump, in no hurry to do anything that might interrupt his birds-eye perspective of the rest of the park. (This cost me $7...which felt like a rip-off, until I compared it to the duck game.)