The carnival came to the fairgrounds on a Wednesday, and by Thursday morning every kid in town knew it.

Not because anyone announced it. Because you could see the Ferris wheel from the road the night before, half-assembled and lit against the dark, and the information moved through the neighborhood the way all important summer information moved -- through screen doors and bicycle routes and somebody's older brother who had already been down to look.

By Friday it was open. By Saturday it was packed. By Sunday afternoon it was already the thing you were going to miss.

Here are fifteen things every kid did at a summer carnival, in no particular order of importance, because at the time they all felt equally important.

1. Negotiated the ticket system with your parents in the parking lot

The carnival ran on tickets. Not money -- tickets. You bought a sheet of them at the booth by the entrance, yellow or red or blue, printed with a cartoon of a clown or a rocket ship. Each ride cost a different number of tickets. The good ones cost four or five. The kiddie rides cost two.

The negotiation happened before you went in. You lobbied for two sheets. Your parents offered one. You settled on one and a half, which meant your father would hold the extra half-sheet and you would come back for it when you needed more. The transaction established the shape of the entire evening.

2. Misjudged which rides would make you sick

This happened to everyone, and it happened by miscalculation, not by cowardice. The ride that looked calm from the ground -- the Scrambler, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the round thing with the spinning cars -- was not calm once it started. The centrifugal force arrived without warning and did not stop for what felt like several minutes longer than necessary.

You got off looking fine. You walked thirty feet. You sat down on a hay bale and didn't move for a while.

3. Studied the midway games before spending a single ticket

There was a strip of games down the middle of the carnival -- the ring toss, the balloon darts, the milk bottle knockdown -- and a smart kid walked the whole strip before spending anything. You were looking for the games that seemed beatable. The basketball toss. The water gun horses. Anything where the mechanism was visible and the outcome seemed related to skill.

This was an illusion, partly. The milk bottles were weighted. The basketball hoops were sometimes slightly undersized. The ring toss rings were sized to make the bottles look easier to land than they were. But you studied the games anyway, and the studying felt like strategy, and strategy felt like it mattered.

4. Ate something your mother would have stopped you from eating at home

A corn dog was acceptable. A corn dog was food. The funnel cake was where the negotiations broke down, if your mother was paying attention, which on a carnival night she often wasn't, because she was talking to someone from church she hadn't seen since Easter.

The funnel cake came out of hot oil and went under powdered sugar and landed on a paper plate that went translucent with grease. It was not food. It was a carnival-only substance. The cotton candy worked the same way -- pink or blue, larger than your head, gone in four minutes, leaving your hands sticky until someone found a water spigot. The combination of these things at once was not recommended, and most kids tried it anyway.

5. Lost someone in the crowd for ten minutes

This was not a crisis. It resolved itself. You turned around and your family was gone and you walked back toward where you thought you'd come from and found them looking at a display of chainsaw-carved bears near the exit.

But the ten minutes mattered. You moved through the crowd alone, which was not how you usually moved anywhere, and the noise was loud and the lights were close and the ground was sawdust over packed dirt and you were a kid among a lot of strangers. It was fine. Looking back, it was better than fine. You navigated something by yourself. The chainsaw bears were right where you expected them to be.

6. Spent four tickets on a game you lost immediately

Not the game you'd studied. A different one -- an impulse purchase, a booth you passed on the way to something else, a barker who said something that made you feel like this one was winnable. The ring toss, usually.

You stepped up. You threw the rings. None of them landed. The man behind the booth said something encouraging and offered you three more rings for an extra ticket. You declined. You walked away. This was a useful lesson delivered at a price of four tickets, and most kids absorbed it correctly: the midway games existed to take your tickets, not to give you a stuffed bear. The prize inventory was mostly for show.

7. Rode the Ferris wheel

This is not on the list because it was exciting, though some kids found it exciting. It's on the list because everyone rode the Ferris wheel, always, as a matter of course. It was the ride you rode when you had two tickets left and the evening was winding down. It was the ride that let you see the whole fairground from above, all the lights and the grease and the crowd below you, getting smaller as the wheel turned.

The Ferris wheel was slow. The car swayed when it stopped to load someone new at the bottom. The safety bar was a metal rod that locked across your lap and did not inspire tremendous confidence. But you went up and you saw the town from a height you didn't normally see it from, and then you came back down and the evening was over.

8. Watched someone win a large stuffed animal and felt genuine envy

Not the cheap animals -- the little bears that ringed the game booths -- but the large ones, the oversized dogs and the giant pandas that hung at the back of the booth reserved for the top prizes. These required hitting every target, or landing the ring perfectly, or some other feat that was technically possible but rarely achieved.

When someone did it, a loose crowd gathered. The carnie unhooked the large stuffed animal and handed it over with a kind of ceremony. The winner, usually a teenage boy who had spent eight dollars and twenty minutes at the shooting gallery, carried the enormous prize through the crowd. You watched him go and knew you would not win one that night.

9. Came home with something in your pocket

A prize of some kind made it home, even on the bad ticket nights. A rubber spider from the prize shelf at the ring toss. A plastic whistle in a shape nobody could identify. A bag of circus peanuts from the free-sample bowl at the candy booth. A laminated card with your name airbrush-painted on it by a man with a very fast hand.

The item was not the point. The item was the proof that you had been somewhere.

10. Watched the carnival workers more than the rides

The men who ran the rides had a specific look -- older than your parents, tanned the specific color of people who lived outside, wearing the same t-shirt they'd worn the day before, moving through the routine of strapping people in with the economy of someone who had done it seven thousand times and was no longer curious about it. They were efficient and not unfriendly and completely elsewhere, in some interior sense, while they worked.

You watched them from the ride because there was nothing else to do while it was moving. You wondered where they slept. Where they had come from. Whether they had been anywhere in a long time that was not a fairground.

11. Found the edge of the fairground

Every carnival had an edge. The lights stopped somewhere. The sawdust ran out. Beyond the last booth there was a chain-link fence or a rope line or just darkness -- the field beginning, the sound of the highway, the rest of the world sitting outside the lit perimeter.

Kids went there. It was away from the adults. It was the part of the carnival that wasn't for sale. You stood at the edge for a few minutes and looked at the lights from the outside and then you went back in.

12. Stood in front of the funhouse mirror for too long

One building, always, had the warped mirrors -- the kind that made you six feet tall and three inches wide, or short and spherical, or stretched in the middle and compressed at the ends. These were not sophisticated. They were bent pieces of reflective metal in a plywood frame.

You stood in front of each one. You made faces. If you were with a sibling, you stood in front of the same mirror together and pointed at each other's distorted version. The whole thing took three minutes. You didn't forget it.

13. Tried to time the water gun horses perfectly

The water gun horses were the game where you sat on a stool, aimed a fixed water gun at a target, and the stream of water you sent into it inflated a balloon or moved a horse across a track. First horse to finish won a prize. Every player's horse was the same. Every gun was the same. Strategy was mostly illusion.

You sat down anyway. You aimed carefully. You usually finished second or third, which won you a modest prize from the middle shelf. That prize went in your pocket with the rubber spider. You walked away satisfied, which was not the outcome the game was designed to produce, but the carnival was good at that.

14. Tried to stay longer than allowed

The argument started fifteen minutes before your parents wanted to leave. You weren't ready. There were two tickets left. You hadn't done the thing you'd meant to do.

Your parents stood at the entrance and waited. You spent the two tickets fast. You ran back. On the way out, you turned around once to look at the whole thing from the outside -- the Ferris wheel still turning, the midway still lit, the music still going. And then you went to the car.

15. What didn't need to come back

The carnivals of the 1960s and 1970s were genuinely under-regulated. Ride inspections were inconsistent. The safety standards that now govern traveling carnivals -- mechanical inspections, operator licensing, load limits -- were unevenly applied and sometimes not applied at all. Kids got hurt on rides that should have been taken out of service earlier.

The midway games were legal but not honest. The odds were not posted. The tricks -- the weighted bottles, the undersized hoops -- were not disclosed. You were allowed to spend a week's allowance finding out. The barkers said whatever they wanted.

This is the part of the carnival that looks worse in retrospect, not better. The romanticized version of the traveling carnival depends on a kind of controlled danger that was sometimes not especially controlled. Your child going to a carnival today is going to something that is structurally safer in ways that are not visible from the midway but matter. The Ferris wheel still turns. The funnel cake is the same. The safety bar is now something you can actually trust.

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The carnival was in town for three days, and you were there for two of them, and it wasn't enough. It was never enough. That's the part nobody planned for and everybody felt the same way about, every year, pulling out of the fairgrounds parking lot with a rubber spider and powdered sugar still on your shirt.

What's the one thing you did at a summer carnival that you still remember clearly? Did you ever win one of the big stuffed animals? Drop your memory in the comments -- we'd love to hear.