After parking, a stroll past the playgrounds, swings, teeter-totters, slides, the boat ride that is not actually a boat ride, past the old rail caboose now used as an interactive museum, past maple and oak and bamboo, and up to the Dentzel Carousel, 85 years old and still wooden strong, steam-powered, accompanied by an equally aged Wurlitzer 125 Band Organ, and you approach the ticket taker with money in hand, ready to relive your youth, the hooting calliope music filling the air, the painted horses and giraffes and ostriches and lions inviting you, mouths open, to ride their backs, but, "Sorry," says the man, "you're too old," when what he really means is, "You're too fat," because standing on the boards next to the impaled animals are mothers and fathers, supporting their children straddling the wooden steeds, and some of them are older than you, some much older.

When you point this out, the man says, "Sorry, full up," even though only half the saddles are occupied, and he closes the chain link door with a snap, and the music crescendos and the carousel begins to spin, round and round, and you know that no matter how long you hang around here the ticket taker will never let you on, afraid you may crush the ancient craftsmanship restored 30 years ago, and he doesn't want to have to explain to his supervisor how the heavy chick just wouldn't take no for an answer.

So you walk away, wander through the park itself, full today, a nice day, blue skies, jacket weather, with families hoping to lure children away from video game consoles and out into the crisp fresh air, some with lunches from Bojangles or Boston Market splayed out on picnic tables, and the smell reminds you that you skipped breakfast because your brother had forgotten to take his meds again and had had a meltdown, trashing his apartment, huddled in the corner weeping, afraid the cops were after him again, or the mob, or one secret society or another, or whatever conspiracy was running through his head today, and it took a call to his caretaker for him to settle down and ingest his dosage and disappear into the bedroom for a coma-like sleep that would last at least until evening, and you just had to get out of there, sick of having to keep coming over again and again because he is all you have now, but unable to live your own life, find your own love, just wanting to escape for a few hours, maybe remember how it felt when your mother, before the car crash, way before, even before your brother was born, would bring you to the park and put you on the carousel, and it would feel as if you were flying.

Past the picnic tables, and over the old wooden bridge that crossed the lake, boards complaining underfoot, and all along the wide wooden handrails are the carvings and markings of dozens of lovers' semiotic expressions, J & J 4EVER or Pat + Kenny circumscribed by a heart, and you yearn to have something to add to the collection, but the last date you went on was three years ago, blind, and it ended badly, with insults and threats, and false insinuations, and you had to change your phone number afterward.

In the lake below swim a family of geese, some white and some gray and some the color of milk chocolate left out in the sun too long, all squonking and it sounds as if they are yelling, "Too fat! Go away! Too fat!" while they have no reason to say such things, paddling with big fat goose rumps high in the air, their chin wattles wobbling. As you approach, they paddle harder, extending necks close down to the water, kicking splash behind them in their efforts to get away, far away from the fat girl on the bridge.

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