Perhaps a Ferris Wheel

By C G Quilitzsch III

You just inherited more money than you could ever dream of.
You should:
A) Go on a road trip
B) Join a circus
C) Solve a mystery
D) Do laundry
E) Reboot your life
F) All of the above

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359765591

Book preview

Perhaps a Ferris Wheel

Perhaps A Ferris Wheel

By C. G. Quilitzsch III

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Carl Quilitzsch III

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2019

ISBN 978-0-359-76559-1

CGQ3 Publishing

North Brookfield, MA 01535

For

Jesus, those who know Him, and those who should

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are My ways higher than your ways,

and My thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:9

What the Ocean Took

The funeral was lovely.  Stunning.  Simply beautiful.  Flowers everywhere.  People everywhere.  The parlor was packed to the point of overflowing.  Throngs of visitors arrived to pay their last respects to a couple of empty caskets.  Yeah, they were empty.  Empty because the people who should have been occupying them were missing.  Missing at sea.  Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  Pieces of their little ship were found, but the bodies of my parents never were.  They had cleverly named the boat The Antitanic.

So people came.  They all came.  Friends came – or folks that claimed to be.  Family came – members of my bloodline I hadn’t seen since my Grandfather’s funeral.   All sorts of other random and not so random people flocked to the funeral of the decade.  Some of the most influential movers and shakers in the state, maybe in the country showed up.  A few people trekked in from the West Coast.  One of the mourners even flew in from Europe.  She wondered, out loud, more than a few times, through tear-puffy eyes, if she, on her way from Paris, passed over the very spot where my parents met their demise.  She said she was sure she did because she felt a strange queasiness halfway through her flight where she was sure the accident had happened.  Her digestive uneasiness was probably more the result of a mixture of turbulence and complimentary beverages they give you in the first-class seats.  I was just glad when it was all over.  You never feel so lonely as when you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who want you to know that you’re not alone.

Yup.  My parents were gone.  Both of them.  Tragic, right?  Maybe.  I was still working that out.  Now, before you get all weepy and start to feel any kind of pity for me, don't.  It’s not as big of a deal as you might think.  Seriously.  The shock was big.  I mean that’s really not something you think will happen to anyone you know, especially to the people who called themselves your parents.  However, my parents losing their lives in the Atlantic didn’t really change things much for me.  I wouldn’t see them at all anymore, but that’s about it.  Don’t get me wrong, it's not that I didn't love them, but it's not like I really knew them either.  It was like when you find out your fourth-grade teacher had died.  It’s a shame, and you’ll miss her – if and when you reminisce about your years in elementary school.

My parents did what they needed to do for me.  Their seemingly infinite streams of income provided for all my physical needs, and they hired people to take care of all my emotional ones.  They were much too busy to waste any of their own time on me.  After all, the yacht wasn't going to sail itself, the committees wouldn't run themselves, the networks wouldn’t network themselves, and the fundraisers wouldn't organize themselves. I used to wonder why they just couldn't have included me in their business and social endeavors, but I quit thinking about it when I became a teenager.  I pretty much decided to live my life and let them live theirs.  It wasn't a strained relationship we had, it was simply a non-relationship.  And, strange as it may sound, I was okay with that.

My solid upbringing was probably the biggest reason I was fine with my parents being absent.  As I mentioned, it wasn't them who brought me up, they simply chose the right people to do the job.  Kudos to them for the one good parenting decision they made – letting someone else do it.  So I wasn’t like most kids in my situation, kids who end up being selfish, spoiled rotten, attention seeking trouble makers.  Most of them have enjoyed the hospitality of a jail cell more than once, always to be bailed out and smoothed over by Mommy and Daddy – who promptly and gently slap the wayward child's wrist before going back to ignoring him.  Or her. 

My parents made sure Betty and Luis Tangarian were there to keep me in line.  And they did.  Now I wasn't perfect – not by a long shot.  I spent plenty of time acting out of line, hovering close enough to the line to keep out of the deep trouble.  Thank God.

They were a young older couple, if that makes sense.  Betty and Luis Tangarian, the BLT's some people called them.  Old enough to have raised a few of their own children into responsible adults and young enough to have the energy and wits to raise one more.   Just one because I was an only child.  I guess I still am.  Not sure I have the typical only child stigma, though.  You know, aggressive, sick, playing all day with Joseph J. Jowls – the friend nobody else on earth can see but you.  Maybe it's not being an only child, but how parents raise their only child that makes the world see these kids as so messed up, as ticking time-bombs and potential burdens to society.  Whether the stigma is due to the kids or the parents, or if it's just a figment of people's imaginations, it's not a problem with me.  Again, it's not that I don't have my demons, it's just that only child syndrome isn’t one of them.

Thank God.  And thank Betty and Luis.  They gave me discipline and direction.  They gave me love and laughter.  They gave me a happy childhood while my parents were having happy, middle-aged childhoods of their own.

They were the ones who had told me the news that my mother and father would not be returning from their excursion to the other hemisphere.  They were more distraught than I was.

Sometimes I wish I had known my biological parents a little better.  But when I think about Betty and Luis – my real parents, I'm kind of relieved things worked out the way they did.  Kind of sick, isn’t it?

***

And there I was, holding the proverbial blank check, wondering what my next step should be.  Remember those infinite streams of income?  Now they’re all mine.  So, what am I supposed to do with them?  I wasn’t groomed to manage that kind of dough, after all, the BLT’s weren’t payed nearly what they were worth.  They would probably just tell me to invest it, but what to invest in they would have no idea.  Poor blind leading rich blind. 

I marveled at the possibilities.  I could be like a lot of young people who come into large amounts of money and just spend it until it ran out, and then keep spending until I found myself in debt and addicted to pain pills or crack or diet soda or whatever.  Luis wouldn't like that, and Betty would probably smack me in the head.

Maybe I could get all humanitarian and donate all the cash to some charity to save some endangered kind of fern only found in the South American rain forests – or would that be considered floratarian?

Build an orphanage in Africa, open a fine dining restaurant, buy a few fast food franchises, go hang-gliding, run for congress, run for president – no, too young for that.

Buy a professional baseball team then buy a championship.

Invest in penny stocks, invest in asset-backed securities and municipal and corporate bonds.  Throw the world's most gigantic slumber party, invest in pillow manufacturing stocks.

Run a marathon.  Walk a marathon.  Buy a treadmill.  Get liposuction.  Botox.  Hire a personal plastic surgeon.  Or a personal trainer.

Buy a boat, sail around the world, sink in the Atlantic.  That's been done before.

My mind spun around itself until I smelled something burn, so I folded the imaginary check and put it into my shirt pocket.  I needed a rest.  Inheriting more money than you can handle, more money than any one person could spend in a few lifetimes, can suck the energy out of your body faster and more thoroughly than one of those vacuum cleaners demonstrated by the poor guy who comes to your house saying a friend of yours thought you would be interested in this fine, powerful, yet light-weight cleaning machine he presently holds in his hands.  Being filthy rich can take a toll on one’s body.

I shuffled to the living room.  My backside fell into the giant, plush sofa in the middle of the giant, hollow cavern in the middle of the giant, hollow house.  A house, grandiose and intimidating.  Looming over the perfectly manicured landscaping, showing off its world-class architecture, proudly standing on a man-made hill, not knowing how empty it was.  Just a house.  Like it had always been.  Nothing more, just a house.  A big, empty house full of big, expensive things that somehow added to the emptiness.

I thought about tearing the whole thing down and putting a Ferris wheel up in its place.  Like the London Eye.  I’d call it the Boston Suburban Roundy Thing.  Then, instead of emptiness, the man-made hill would be filled with kids laughing and excitedly talking about how they could see the whole town from way up there.  Young lovers stealing kisses when their cart reached the top and gently rocked back and forth, stirring up stomach butterflies.  Elderly couples remembering when they used to steal kisses on the top of the Ferris wheels of their youths, reliving their own stomach butterfly days from years long ago.  Much better than the emptiness of the house that sits there now.  Much more fun.  Much more interesting.  Much more practical, even.  An empty house doesn't do anyone any good, but a Ferris wheel – a Ferris wheel would bring life to that dead, man-made hill.   I bet George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. would be happy with such thoughts.  Or maybe he would ask what in the world I was thinking.  But I don't think he's around for me to ask his opinion, anyway.

I told the emptiness to play my favorite playlist – and shuffle it. Sounds from the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival jumped out of the Bose speakers and swung into my ears.  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself at the festival, watching the Duke lead his orchestra in one of the most incredible live performances in jazz history.  The music plays on, and I am taken from mid-fifties Rhode Island to a place of white nothingness with no time to attach to it.  I was nowhere.  I was with no one.  No one except Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, and the rest of the band.  Gonsalves was electric.  His tenor saxophone filled up every corner of the nothingness and had me dancing on a table that wasn't even there.  And I don't dance.

The white nothing dissolved to black and I was too soon back in my own place.  A place not too long ago that belonged to my parents.  A place that was just a thought away from becoming a pile of rubble from which would grow a wonderful, community enhancing Ferris wheel.   A place that was probably just going to remain empty.  Cavernous.  I could do anything with the monster house. Anything at all.  But without a living, breathing, active heart living in it, a building could not be filled with anything substantial enough to really fill it.  A stomach filled with Jolly Ranchers and Mountain Dew. 

I was still on the sofa. The Marsalis family was having fun with their rendition of Linus and Lucy.  I could see Charles M. Schultz's cartoon beagle dancing with his nose in the air.  Not in a snobby, better-than-you kind of nose in the air, but a carefree, taste-the-sky kind of nose in the air.  I almost felt the same way.  Briefly.

Listening to music can make you feel almost anything for a short time.  It can crack you up, or it can beat you down.  It can enlighten you, or it can confuse the snot out of you.  It makes you experience your entire set of emotions, makes you experience them in a full range of intensity.  It grabs on to your soul and shakes it for a little while.  Music moves you.  Absolutely moves you.  But usually not for long.

And there I was, enveloped in the big sofa – in the big sofa that had just become all mine – that wrapped its soft leather arms around me like the wings of a mother hen.  I was an egg ready to hatch.  Ready to bust out of the shell that had been crusting around me since I could remember.  That kind of crusting will happen to you when you're a privileged kid being raised by the help.   I was ready to bust out for sure, but just how to do it I didn't know yet.  Until I figured it out, I'd just continue to sit under the protective, comforting wing of the – of my – sofa, listening to Miles Davis blow So What.

Sleep.