Carousel Horse in Lisbon

Yesterday Kathryn and I followed a lady around Lisbon for a tour of all the "historic shops" and other truly fine and unique places mostly in the old part of town.

The "historic shops" are like the "Century Farms" in Missouri that have been around a quite a while.

Anyway, we stopped in a boutique tea and candy shop, and there I espied this really fine carousel horse . . . and the years fell away like a sycamore's leaves in October. I could hear the Pacific Ocean shushing the days on the sandy beach of Alameda, California, in the summer of my twenty-third year.

There was a carousel on the town side of the road along the beach in those days. There were probably some more carnival attractions, but I don't remember those. The carousel was a permanent installation, though, and it stirred my soul.

I fell in heart-lust with a yellow galloper that had a red harness and saddle like the one in the photo below. I must have driven my baby-blue Triumph TR-3 to that carousel four dozen times just so I could look at that horse. I loved the curves the woodcarver sanded into the built-up assembly. I caressed the polished paint of that horse's gleaming neck and reveled in the way the light shone and shadowed in the curls of his mane.

And the thought rooted itself in my brain . . . I want this horse. I want to set this up in the living-room corner of our third-floor apartment that actually -was- on the beach. And I rode that horse more attentively after that, time and again. I memorized every fitting that connected the horse to the ring. I stashed a small can of 3-in-1 oil in my glove compartment and slipped it into my pocket every time I came to the ride. I gently daubed golden oil on each screw and nut and bolt on that brass-plated pole that skewered my yellow horse, that harnessed him to an eternal round on that damn beach. I collected a set of three pairs of wrenches that would handle all the bolts and one Phillips-head screwdriver for the two screws.

I took to polishing the pole the horse hung from. Not to make it shiny. To erase my fingerprints.

I figured he would fit behind the seats of the TR-3 (her name was "Elizabeth," by the way). I did recognize the need to wrap the horse in a tarp of some kind. An amorphous shame is not as blatant as a carousel horse. This was in the days before the two-pound blue things you can get at Home Depot. A tarp in the '60s was oiled and waxed canvas, and you by-God knew you were covering something up. Probably weighed forty pounds.

I knew the local police would come out as soon as the horse was reported missing, and my voracious reading of detective thrillers advised me repeatedly not to park my TR on the beach sand and dirt. The Mounties would make plaster casts of my tires and track me to my hidden lair. So I took to parking alongside the curb, on the asphalt.

The same with my size-13's. Plaster casts would lead the forces of law and order to my very welcome mat. That was a poser.

So I concluded I needed to buy some small horseshoes to attach to my big ole leather shoes. That way when the cops came out, all they'd find would be an empty brass pole and a set of hoofprints leading from the carousel to the street. And they would have to wonder about that . . . 

I never did put together the hoofprint shoes. I eventually lost track of the wrenches and screwdriver. I came to the realization that, though my buds wouldn't rat me out about the glorious carousel horse in our living room, word -would- get around, and I'd wind up in jail, a broken man. Besides, when I got transferred, how would I get it aboard ship?

But I still think about how cool it would be to have a wooden carousel horse in the house. Not one of the new fiberglas ones. 

Wooden.

190424  photos to follow