Slingshot

The summer before last, we were fearless. In 1999, Katherine and I came to Ocean City for an engagement party that my mother and her five sisters threw for us on the deck of my Aunt Susan's summer home on Ocean City's Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is the southerly end of the town, the new money mansions as opposed to the thirties-era salt-boxes up north. We opened presents until dusk fell. Then Katherine and I hiked down to the main drag of the boardwalk and took on everything the amusement parks had to offer: the Giant Ferris Wheel, The Inverter, The City Jet, The Spanish Galleon (Katherine's favorite). We were thrown and twisted and twirled, and Katherine almost got sick but didn't. My grandmother was alive then, and so was my mother.

Several weeks after we left, this happened: a new roller coaster at Wonderland Pier, the Wild Wonder, apparently malfunctioned. Apparently the car nearly reached the apex of its first major ascent when some mechanism failed. It began to roll backwards, gathering speed. When it slammed into the car behind it, which was being loaded with passengers, another mechanical failure apparently occurred, allowing two occupants, a young woman from New York and her very young child, to be thrown from their restraints. They flew out of the car, through the air, and into a steel support beam. They died instantly, apparently.

As well, as you may recall from my last letter, my grandmother died the following Christmas, and my mother died the following June, six days after my birthday, both quickly, both with little warning. And then in August we returned to Ocean City again. People asked: will it be hard going back to Ocean City without your mother? And I had no answer, the same non-answer I had and have to any question about how hard it is or will be now that all these things have happened: Jesus, I don't know.

- John Hodgman, "Slingshot"