Month of May Photo Challenge Day 13: Primary Colors - Red, Blue, Yellow

Mini merry-go-round cart in Great Mall, Milpitas.

Aside from inside malls and certain shops, I don't see a lot of these around anymore. It used to be there was one outside grocery stores or strip malls, especially at retailers like K-Mart or old five-and-dimes like Newberry. I was blown away by the merry-go-round I saw the first time I went to Great America; it was gigantic, and each horse or carriage was so ornate with colors and details. But the mechanical horses I more often rode were outside those old stores; as my mom was wrapping up her shopping and in the cashier line, my dad would often walk me to the ride outside, let me climb on, fish out a quarter that had been jingling against the other change in his pocket, and insert it into the coin feed. Whimsical music to the tune of "William Tell" would play, and the horse bucked in place to a rhythmic cadence. For a brief couple of minutes, I was a cowgirl riding across the Wild West plains, or a princess soaring the skies on her trusted unicorn.

My dad could do wonders with his pocket of change; sometimes he'd feed 50 cents into one of those claw cranes filled with plush toys and a mechanical arm you'd control by a joystick to grab an item with two tries or before time ran out. He'd gauge whether the toys in a particular claw crane's cabinet were stuffed too tightly, thereby minimizing your chance of success, something that he called "cheating" on the retailer's behalf. He'd spend no more than a dollar on two tries, and more often than not, he'd win me a prize that would become part of my massive collection of stuffed animals.

At the mall, I watched a Hispanic family gaze at their toddler, who was riding the little doggie carriage merry-go-round, bright with primary colors. It spun in a slow orbit with repetitive tooney music, a ride kids nowadays may consider boring with all the new technology available to have fun. I wondered what was going on in the toddler's head, whether his imagination had developed yet, and thought back to a time when a couple of quarters got me to look up to my dad as my hero and allowed me to ride a horse among the clouds.