Early in the summer of 1969, my mother brought home a heavy-bottomed machine with a thick, silver cylinder on the top. She set it up in our garage, covering over the surrounding boxes and bicycles with plastic garbage bags. When she turned the thing on, a quick spray of sugar crystals spurted out; then the machine caught its gears and rumbled on, spreading layers of sugared filaments along the sides of its gigantic metal basin. “We’re going to work a parade tomorrow,” she announced brightly. My brothers stared blankly at each other. Mom handed Nathan a pile of plastic produce bags from the grocery store. “Hold this open for me,” she instructed. Then my mother reached over and dipped her fingers coolly into the big, metal machine, pulling out a bright stream of pink cotton. Nathan held the bag carefully, and my mother slipped the candy easily inside, like delivering fresh dough to a baker’s oven. I was too little to help, so I just watched, pulling occasional strands of fluffed sugar out of the air. I could see the sweat beads begin to form along my mother’s forehead as she turned and dipped again and again, using her arms carefully, folding them just so, elbows suspended in air. Her hair grew damp and frizzy, and her lipstick turned crusty and sugar-coated as the night wore on. But my mother moved too quickly for questioning. By midnight, we had filled the family van with bloated bags of cotton candy, stick balloons, and homemade popcorn balls.

“Ready?” Mom grinned that first night, slamming shut the van doors with all her wares and children inside. And we nodded wearily, our heads bobbing asleep as she turned over the engine and began to drive.

That’s when I imagined how those other children must have envied me: wondering what it must be like to be me, living as I did at the heart of such an extraordinary life.

It might take us hours to get wherever it was we were going: Victorville or Fresno or Weed. Sometimes all the way up to the Oregon border. We’d arrive just after dawn, rolling into empty parking lots, usually a bank or a library, and start the process of preparation: grinding ice to fill the flimsy plastic cups we drenched with syrup, or tying sticks to the rubber nubs of inflated balloons. Everybody took something different: balloons or ice cones or candy apples or pink popcorn balls. But it was my mother who had a particular genius for salesmanship. On the parade route, she knew how to shout louder than the marching band, smile more compellingly than the rosebud princess, clap her feet better than the Clydesdales. Because I was the youngest, I went along with her, plucking the coins out of children’s sticky palms and handing them to my mother until I got tired. Then she would lift me up and set me down in the middle of her little metal shopping cart, where I could sit and watch the show through the mottled light of aluminum basketing and sugared cellophane bags. That’s when I imagined how those other children must have envied me: wondering what it must be like to be me, living as I did at the heart of such an extraordinary life.

Several years later, when I went out alone on a parade route for the first time, it was Mom’s younger brother who let it happen, handing me his fistful of stick balloons and a paper roll of nickels. “Why don’t we split up?” he suggested. “We’ll cover more ground that way.” My uncle Ray was just back from a dozen years in the army, and he wasn’t afraid of anything.