I unwrapped that old carousel ticket roll right there on my rug, and I had to sit down, because inside was a photograph and a note, and the photograph was of a little girl on a white carousel horse being lifted up by a young man, and the little girl was me, and the young man was my Samuel.
The man who ran that carousel for sixty years, an old fellow named Gio who sold the tickets and worked the calliope, had left the note. He wrote that a carousel man watches the same families come round and round for generations, and that he had seen this whole town grow up on those painted horses.
The photograph was from the very day, decades ago, that Samuel first lifted me up onto the white horse with the red saddle when we were both children, before we were ever sweethearts. Gio caught it. And clipped behind it, a second photograph, of the two of us grown, the day Samuel proposed to me on that same horse while the calliope played in 1961.
For sixty years old Gio watched the children of this town ride his carousel and grow up and fall in love and lift their own children onto the same horses, and when he saw a story unfold across the years on one of his horses, he tucked the pictures of it inside the horses body, so the horse would carry the whole story round and round forever.
His note said a carousel is the only place a man can watch a person be three years old and then thirty on the same painted horse, and that he could not bear for all those turning years to stop when the ride shut down. He wrote that the white horse with the red saddle carried a little girl who grew up to be proposed to on its back, and that if it ever came home to her, she should have both days back, the child and the bride.
Samuel and I had forty-two years. Gio watched our whole story turn on that horse, from a child being lifted up to a woman being asked to marry, and he saved both.
I have the two photographs framed together now, beside the horse in my living room. A little girl in Samuels arms, and years later a woman he asked to be his wife, on the same painted horse, round and round.
I bought back the old white carousel horse because the pole was bent. It carried the whole of my life with Samuel, from the first day to the proposal, saved by a carousel man who watched this town grow up going in circles and thought the turning was worth keeping.