Moonlight teeth.

March 1st, El Paso.
More circus practical matters, or what goes on in some trailers.
The generator that keeps the circus going occupies the entire bed of one of the tractor trailers, and it is always parked next to the converted fifth-wheel trailer that houses whoever doesn't have a place to stay of his or her own.
The trailer is 40 feet long and divided into individual rooms, each outfitted with bunk beds and measuring about five feet wide. There is space for a TV on a stand by the lower bed and a small closet space by the door. There are five of these rooms and a bigger one in the raised part of the fifth-wheel, with five beds in it. One of these small rooms was Fridman's home for the three years that he worked at this circus. That's where I would come and visit him, once even with Yogi the cat in tow (he was sick and I didn't want to leave him alone, so I packed him in the car with the rest of the week end's necessities.) He was lucky in that he had the room to himself, and so we could have our privacy too. The trailer doesn't have any toilets, so you have to use the portable ones the public also uses. The thing is they can be parked close by or at the other end of the lot. Having to get up and dress in the middle of the night to go pee, walking in all kinds of terrain in all kinds of weathers, is a slight drawback on the romantic notion of living the supposedly bohemian life of the road. Soon we devised our own portable toilet for Number One, which consisted of a gallon water bottle cut at the top. Works wonders.
To complete the "commons" trailer portrait, it also has two showers, although hot water can be a luxury.
Sweet silver lining: brushing your teeth under the moonlight.

As I'm writing this it is after noon and Dylan is sleeping in the car seat in the living room. I didn't have the heart to take him out and wake him up in the process, after coming back from a doctor's visit earlier today. He caught a cold from us and has been sneezing for a few days and this morning he also started coughing, so I decided to take him to the doctor. A cold is not so much an issue and it actually helps building up his immunity, but I didn't want it to get to his lungs. This is one of the hardest thing about traveling with the circus with a baby: you don't have a permanent pediatrician to rely on, and have to find someone on the spot wherever you are. I feel better in that I finally got the three of us health insurance through a French company, so the outrageous cost of health care when you're not insured in this country is not going to worry me sick every time the baby or one of us has to be seen. The circus doesn't provide health insurance.

We're leaving tonight for Las Cruces, New Mexico, and as I was getting things ready in the trailer and taking out the trash I found Jay Summers, the circus' electrician, flashlight in hand, working on our truck's brake system, which wasn't connecting properly with the trailer's. In essence I was driving without any trailer brakes, relying solely on the truck's. As Jay just told me, with any vehicle you're doing 80 percent of the braking with the front brakes, and when you add a 15,000-pound house on your tail, it becomes, well, tricky, to say the least. On the trip to Roswell it was rainy and wet and I went hydroplaning several times as I hit the brakes, almost running into Fridman's tractor trailer once on a highway exit ramp. We knew we had to do something, only not exactly what. Jay is not only the electrician for the circus but also what we would call un homme a tout faire in French, a kind of Jack of all trades. He'll fix things up; he's the one you ask about all kinds of technical stuff.
He now has rewired the truck properly, so I should be OK from now on. Thanks Jay. That's the cool thing about traveling with the circus: there is usually somebody who can fix whatever is wrong on your truck, trailer and everything else in between. I like this idea of total resourcefulness. He explained that the trailer brakes will go on first, then the truck's, because the weight of the trailer is such that it needs to slow down first in order for the truck to slow down without heating up its brakes into the danger zone. I'm learning every day, as I told Jim when I started working back in January.
All this truck and trailer business makes me think of my mother, who is scared to death at the mere idea o driving such a thing. It's her birthday tomorrow so I'll call her tonight, taking into account the time difference. She'll be 74. Somehow it sounds just wrong - my Mom can't be 74 years old. She doesn't look it, even though she's showing her age more and more in subtle ways, as I found out when she was with us in Savannah. The stress I put her through indirectly made her look old in a way I had never seen before, and it made me sad.