San Francisco.

Jan. 27, Dallas, Texas.

To the friends we left in the Bay Area: Beverly and Bob, always there with something for the kids, garage sales fanatics, Beverly with the quick wit behind her good humor ("Have you met a terrorist lately?" ,) just seeing them drive in made me happy, Margaret and her big heart, Richard and Frank and Tim, their hospitality, Natalie and Marc, friends of the spirit, always.
This is what we left.

San Francisco, Nov. 21, 2007.

To Hugo.

Jan. 20, Hugo, Oklahoma.

It took us a week to come from northern California. A week to enter another world altogether, a week of bitter cold nights, strange bedfellows and a sordid motel.
We left El Cerrito on Monday, almost six months to the day after Circus Chimera closed unexpectedly in early July. It was six months of paradise suspended, perfect weather and enchanted places, the Metro Hotel in Petaluma with Paris the cat where my mother and her friend Margaret stayed, a ride through postcard dairy country along the highway to Bodega Bay and the chowder at the seaside cafe, strolling through the "historic downtown," shopping at a posh of malls (complete with valet parking) in Marin county just a few blocks from the trailer park we had moved to, looking for Christmas presents with my mother after Margaret left and Fridman went to Texas, then to Vegas, leaving us to ourselves and the babies, and time disappeared from under us as it does and the month and a half of her visit was up and we took her to the airport in San Francisco and Dylan started crying when she stepped into the security area and he could not follow.
It took us a week to travel from northern California.
It became cold when we were in Las vegas, sleeping in the trailer parked on the street at a friend's house one night. We bundled up, the four of us arranged like dominoes in the full-size bed, head to toes and the babies in between, sweat-pants and socks, extra layers under the triple blankets, and Dylan being Dylan keeps throwing off the covers, the cold wind blowing in from the head of the bed, it is open because Fridman never finished the job of reconstructing the wall and there is a gap two inches wide where the air comes through, so out he goes in the night with duck tape the next day at an RV park lost in the desert dust somewhere in Kingman, Arizona, to try and close the gap, and it works, it is less cold in the bedroom, but it is colder the day after in Albuquerque, and the heaters fail to warm us up as we eat dinner in the trailer after a day's drive across two states, and a water drop which failed to fall at the tap instead has turned into ice, and it is cold, cold, cold when we go to bed, not warmed up by the food but chilled, still, and daylight brings only the illusion of relief as we embark onto another day on the road, dreaming maybe it could be the last? the babies are quiet and let us drive hours at a time, not a 12-hour stretch as I used to do driving across the country by myself but still, but then the truck stalls a few feet from the gas pump in Amarillo and we're stuck sideways at the entrance to the gas station, powerless to move, and a good samaritan appears and rescues us and we crawl on til we can't.
It is the last night on road, if our luck holds, and I'm tired just contemplating another night of bone chilling trailer so I beg Fridman to stop at a motel for one night, just tonight, I dream of a warm shower - no bath in days, the pipes are still frozen in the trailer - the bliss of a warm shower and a warm bed, the simple comfort of warmth; Fridman is reluctant, finally he passes all the national brand ones with the promise of reasonably clean sheets in a town called Childress in the Texas panhandle and stops at a motel with an empty parking lot called Budget Inn which advertises clean rooms on an electronic panel above the door to the office, and there is only one car parked in front of one of the rooms, I should have known, and the windows of the rooms are small and high, like prison windows I think as I'm waiting, half asleep, for Fridman to check us in, the real window must give out onto the back is what comes through my mind, and then I go in and stand in the most sordid room I have ever seen in so many years of road trips on a shoestring budget: there is no window in the back, only an old AC unit mounted onto the wall blasting warmish air into a room with no lights at the beds, and I don't know which one is worse, the pee-stained bathroom door or the amount of dirt and trash under the beds as we move them close together so the babies won't fall during the night, or the crumbling bathroom rack, or the peeking scotch-taped tissue holder with no tissues, or that the room reeks and makes me feel as if I have fallen at the bottom of an endless well where exhaustion and my own disgust don't matter anymore. I am exhausted but I cannot sleep. In the morning, still, I showered. The hot water felt good when I closed my eyes, breathing in deeply; there was only a small towel and it was badly frayed, worn to the thread, with more than the tinge of a large red stain on it.
Later that day we drove the last leg of the trip, up to Hugo, Oklahoma, Fridman and I taking a memory ride on a road we traveled together before, highway 70 in Oklahoma, a road cutting through the rolling hills of the southernmost part of the state along the Red River that makes up the border with Texas, we pass the Shamrock gas station where we stopped two years ago for lunch, it has the look of another era, we pass the small towns, we pass through Durant, where the Peruvian family Cavallini played a few dusty, empty-house dates before closing, the year before Dylan was born, itself a ghost of a circus, and we arrive in Hugo and the first stop is at the Wal-mart, what else, and a surprise, our friend Marcos there and I've never been happier to see him and his house and the junk in his yard makes me feel happy too, I'm somewhere nearing home, I'm forty-one years old, I have two babies, I'm on the move, but I have arrived for now.

Budget Inn, Childress, Texas.

A tooth at the Halloween party.

October 21, El Cerrito.

A whirlwind of a day, a big milestone and a disturbing discovery, and Dylan falls asleep by himself on the couch next to me at 8:30 PM.
Today I decided to switch back to the cloth diapers I had left behind after Dylan became Mr. Wigglish. I had used them again for a time after Nicolas was born and before I joined the circus, but ended up capitulating, vaguely ashamed of myself; two babies, no washer and dryer and nowhere to hang clothes to dry, water a scarce and precious commodity were too much to handle.
And then today I read a disturbing article on all the chemicals we come in contact with in our every day life and the efforts of the U.S. administration to derail legislation by the European Union to ban most of them and tightly control the others. The article opened with a list of the chemicals used in baby stuff, from bottles to diapers. I think I must have blanched, sitting there in the trendy bookstore cafe sipping my hot chocolate for what I thought would be a peaceful reprieve from the usual hustle of the day. The article, by Mark Shapiro, is in this week's Harper's magazine; it is vastly scarier than the worst Halloween movie Hollywood could ever conjure up.
There was a Halloween party tonight at Playland, so I dressed Peanut up in his pumpkin baby suit, Dylan in his skeleton sweater, put on my flamingo outfit (all thanks to Beverly, but more on that story later) and out we trotted across the parking lot. It was there that I discovered Nicolas' first tooth.

The march of time.

October 17, El Cerrito.

I wish I could keep Dylan the way he is now. Keep him forever laughing, singing, dancing, bouncing around with me the way he does now, keep looking at him and see the way he looks now, the way he talks now, the little man he is now, impossibly adorable. But he'll grow up and be an impossibly fabulous man, and I'll just have to keep these memories sharp and warm forever. Easy enough.

To my children: my Heart Sutra.

October 2, El Cerrito.

Je suis si heureuse de vous avoir, mes enfants, mes amours. Sans vous il n'y pas de jours ni de nuits, sans vous il n'y a pas de soleil, pas de pluie, pas de musique et pas de rires, vous etes ce sourire, vous etes mon souffle, mon coeur, vous etes ma vie.

Keeping up the tradition.

September 30, El Cerrito.

Nicolas turns six months old today (the 30th will have to do as September has no 31st.) Last night we celebrated this most important "cumplemeses" with what has become the tradition in our little family of sorts: half a pie for half a year.
This one with Dylan in tow, and it was all the better for it - nothing like an almost two-year-old to beat a six-month-old for cuteness and an extra dollop of joy.

Walking in half.

September 7, El Cerrito.

Dylan is gone and I feel like an amputee. I'm pushing a half-empty stroller and it is as if I were hopping on one leg.
I miss my son.
They are at the Ringling Brothers circus, in Prescott Valley, Arizona, visiting with Patrizia Zerbini, an old boss of Fridman's; they left early this morning and will be back Sunday.

Dinner tonight.

August 29, El Cerrito.

Mostly I'm by myself with the babies.
So. It's 10:15 PM and I haven't gotten around to eating dinner yet.

Like a feather.

August 27, El Cerrito.

Thinking again about the New Orleans stories. The attachment to home, universal, my home, my land, my country, the rest of us mavericks in their wanderings, no strings attached and home is where the heart is, and my babies.
The lightness of being!

View from the parking lot, Playland.

Bourgeois.

August 20, El Cerrito.

An NPR story last week, reading Harper's magazine sitting on my stoop in the morning, after Nicolas has fallen back asleep and before Dylan wakes up, soaking in the sun, unusually warm these past few days, watching the kitties that have set up house outside the trailer, fast becoming adopted, Tintin et Milou or Azamat and Borat, depending on the day, the picture of cute, what else.
What it boils down to is people going into depression, even wanting to commit suicide down in Louisiana because they're living in trailers "meant for short vacation trips," (the NPR story,) the grief of losing a house, ie a life (Duncan Murrell on the dying of New Orleans since Katrina,) and I find myself more baffled than moved, struggling to understand, struggling to feel that loss he writes about, the despair the Katrina evacuees talk about.
I went online after listening to the NPR story, I wanted to see the trailer park, the trailers, maybe then I could relate. The trailers were brand new and the park looked like a dream place to unhitch any trailer, junk or new; it was green and roomy, shaded by tall pines, I would go wild with the gardening there, remembering how I tried to scrape life out of that solid-packed dirt area the exact size of my trailer I called my front yard out in Rubidoux.
As for losing a home I can't speak for it because it has never happened to me, but I find it equally hard to understand how a heap of belongings can so much define you that you feel such unspeakable grief over the loss of it. The writing in Harper's is masterly, harsh and dreamy and beautifully evocative but the reality it interprets escapes me.
Because things happen that way, at the same time I was reading those stories I met a Romanian woman at the playgrounds and she talked about how people in this country have so much, and of course they don't seem to know it (what else?) She and her husband emigrated to this country after their daughter came here to go to school and never returned. She talked about how hard it was in the beginning here, missing home, even though home was where she never even knew a washing machine until 1992; she talked about her mother, who worked until she was 93 and never felt depressed a day in her life, about living ten to a room, raising her children on a Romanian school teacher salary, about the Communist regime taking all her "bourgeois" family belongings away after World War II, everything wiped off; she used the term bourgeois, it had the sound of a dusted, discarded antique, it sounded so European, and so odd, like her Eastern European memories in the America of this age of affluence and ease.

Friedman, Fridman.

August 15, El Cerrito.

The in-laws came to visit this week. Sheyla, Fridman's sister, her boyfriend, Alain, and their eight-month-old boy, Friedman, just left on a plane back to Dallas, Texas, after driving over and spending five short days with us. Sheyla named her son like her brother, my Fridman, except she spelled it the way it's spelled as a family name so it wouldn't be misspelled all the time. It fits a baby even less than an adult and had to fight its way out of my mouth.
At least he won't have to carry such heavy expectations: she also liked Rembrandt.

Drizzle.

August 5, El Cerrito.

It's been a drizzly-grizzly day.
I'm loving it.

The carnival.

The fair.

August 5, El Cerrito.

Away to the carnival in Turlock yesterday to drop Fridman off.
It's the Central Valley, it's hot, it's dusty, it's a world away from the Bay Area. The carnival is Butler Amusements, the company that raked in most of the crew workers from Chimera when the circus closed last month. It's a huge affair, an array of "sleepers" lined up behind the fairgrounds, and private trailers, and trucks, a small city on the move.
The fairgrounds are crowded, it's the annual county fair. Fridman wants Dylan to see the cows, we watch the milking operation, the two of us mesmerized, city folks that we are, really. Afternoons taking pictures of county fairs in rural Illinois, pacing the stalls and chatting up the farmers all come rushing back with the smells, the heat, the sweat, with the sight of Four-H kids meticulously caring for their prized animals, blond heads, long legs, young boys on the verge of adulthood, cheeks flushed, the girls all business, not to be disregarded, whole families meeting, the fathers upfront, shaking hands, the grandfathers, the wives, the babies behind, and everybody is there because it's the big get-together of the year.
The carnival is mostly the noise of the rides and the sullen looks of the men in the stands, one job short of drifters, but also the families, the young Dads with tattoos, and the teenagers, girls and boys all about hanging, the mating game, groups of them eyeing each other, the girls squealing on the rides, the boys tight-mouthed, hormones in full swing. The afternoon air is charged with their whispers.
It was tough for my darling husband. His first job outside of the circus, like a fish out of the water, struggling for air he seemed, agonizing for days on end over the decision whether to sign up or not, there was another possibility and it was a circus one and better paid but he would have been away from us for three months, he would have missed his son's birthday a second time, so he took a big adult step and went to the carnival.
Oh but there are circus people there.

Kisses.

August 1, El Cerrito.

Peanut turned four months yesterday.
Dylan kisses him all the time - then us, then the gorilla on the book cover, then the model in the fashion magazine, so we can't really say for sure what it means that he kisses him all the time.

Off.

July 28, El Cerrito.

An Argentinian couple moving to Spain was having a garage sale over the week end a few blocks from where we are and we could have furnished our whole future-imagined-hoped for house with the stuff they were practically giving away, almost new: a bright red Ikea sofa, a futon sofa-bed, spiffy-looking bookshelves, two twin beds with good mattresses, you could have all that and more for under $200. I was dying to buy the Ikea sofa, but where to put it? I would have settled for outside as trailer patio furniture but Fridman wouldn't have it.
We got a smaller bargain, a dollar for a pair of remote toy cars, one of which even works, and a haircutting machine, the kind that gives you a military-looking edge, also for a buck.
And so Dylan got his first haircut. I wanted it so bad, the tangled hair was driving me crazy, and we had to cut off a chunk of back hair the other day because there was no way to untangle it, and now I look at him and I want to cry for the baby I lost. He looks as if he'd grown overnight into a child, the baby dissolved, cast off like the hair, a memory now.
I want my baby back, I who cringed under the slow pace of Dylan-baby days only last year. I want my baby back before he heads off to school and I lose him even more, before he's off to college with a wave of the hand and kiss on my cheek. They were right in the end then, time does go by too fast.
Only he was never mine, was he.

Before and after.

The junkyard.

July 23, El Cerrito.

Don Sandro's house: the yard crowded with a hapless mess of junk cars, tools and parts, everything from discarded car batteries to a broken lawn-mower.
My trailer is parked behind the house, a hundred feet at the most; to get to the house is not unlike hiking in a jungle (or so I imagine,) you have to carefully pick your way, here it is around cars in various stages of dismemberment, and the landscape has a life of its own, it evolves every day as work progresses and the cars change. It gets more treacherous at night; once I tripped on the kind of rolling benches used in shops to slide under cars as I was walking to the house, carrying Dylan on my hip, nine month pregnant with Nicolas; as I got up it occurred to me the incident would have been funny.
"New" cars appear almost every day, each one more of a disaster than the other. This one has no lights, that one's rear door is stuck, another's front window doesn't get back up once you lower it, another's whole transmission is out of whack.
The cars are don Sandro's business now that he's too old to work in the circus; he buys and sells used cars - very used cars. A Colombian mechanic called Castro arrived one day to help fix them, Wonder Castro with the magic touch, because nothing less would do. He used to work in circuses too, as a mechanic, the place to learn how to do wonders fast and mean, because you have to be on the road tomorrow no matter what.
The circus family has a way to find itself back together - like a benevolent mafia family extending its reach away from home, its grip just as tight, its loyalty just as strong.

Circus dreams.

Beyond the white curtain.

Afternoon cowboy.

The miracle.

Clown.

Winds.

Easter.

Marvin.

Tangles.

Bérengere.

Outhouse.

Lights out.

Souvenirs du cirque (untitled.)

July 21, El Cerrito.

We now have an internet connection at home, thanks to Richard and Frank, as always. Their endless contribution to the well-being of this household can never be matched: free rent, free lunch (he who says there wasn't any never met Richard,) home-delivery laundry services, boundless enthusiasm and equally endless trust, the greatest location west of New York City, life at Richard's is sweet.
(It is made sweeter still by the return of Fridman on Monday.)
To celebrate our return into the web fold I decided to post some circus project photographs. They were taken over the course of my two seasons traveling with Circus Chimera, starting in January 2006. It seems so long ago, a different me altogether, and the project hopes so distant.

Maria Martinez.

July 16, El Cerrito.

Sunday at Norma Quintana's house in Napa. It sits up a steep hill near the country club, a beautiful multi-level home perfectly decorated with photographs and paintings. Among the other guests were another photographer, a Cuban exile who fled to Paris but had to leave France for the United States for fear of the reach of Fidel's long arm, and a singer from Venezuela called Maria Martinez, an under-appreciated talent. She reminded me of my friend Lily, from Peru, she has the same beautiful face and an exquisite soft manner, one of those people who shine like precious stones among the rest of us.
I hope she'll strike gold soon with her singing and touch many more with that rare glow.

The playground.

July 15, El Cerrito.

The days go by, the routine is set, the morning walks with the stroller, Dylan pushing, Nicolas slowly kicking his legs and soon going to sleep, Dylan pointing at his seat when he gets tired, dozing off then sometimes; the afternoons at the park up in the hills of El Cerrito (little hill in Spanish,) at the playground and Dylan just loves it, and I love it, love watching him play, make friends, lose them, run, charm, follow, explore, test his limits, all these months in the circus we were never close enough to a playground, he's 20 month old and this is his first time experiencing one, and for me the newly discovered world of playground's dynamics, the parents and the children, the (mostly but not entirely) Moms' talk, the cliques and the loners (I'm in the latter, being the new Mom on the block,) there are bi, tri and even quadru-lingual kids in this playground too, everything from the Russian grandmother to the Vietnamese-American parents to the Mexican nanny speaking Spanish to the brother and sister in her care, whose mother is French and father Italian (they answer in English.) This is California.
I feel like an official Mom. Fridman is coming back tomorrow, and it seems like his presence will be almost superfluous. Two weeks exactly alone with my babies and I've never been so happy, the sheer sight of them my nirvana, my everything.

The stray twister from Kansas hypothesis.

July 7, El Cerrito.

I'm alone with the two kids; life has its moments. Difficult times revolve around trying to do things like taking a shower, for example, or slightly more prosaic episodes.
Earlier today I’m in the bathroom and I've left Dylan at the tail end of his lunch strapped in his booster seat so he won’t smash Peanut’s face or, say, throw him on the floor, and the aforementioned Peanut is in his rocker. Things seem under control but that’s a false impression (things are never quite under control) as pretty soon he starts to cry; Dylan then follows suit, competing with his brother and the CD player (Cosi Fan Tutte) as he tries unsuccessfully to exit the seat, and oops, here's somebody at the door, and I'm sitting there thinking the only way things can get worse is if the roof caved in or a stray twister from Kansas swooped the trailer away with this appropriately called circus family inside.

Adrift.

July 3, El Cerrito, California.

I am adrift without the circus. I am lost without the familiar rhythm of the shows. My anchor is gone without the trucks and trailers around me.
The day is winding up, stretching painfully, and Dylan is crying out the melancholy I feel. There's a word in Portuguese, a sodade, that captures that feeling, of longing and sadness and bitter-sweet regret. Tonight I'll miss the sound of the generator shutting off.
We left late this morning. It was a morning of adieus, one by one, the dancers, Alexela, going off to Las vegas to try her luck finally, hugging tio Tito for a long time, they were lovers and came out in the open in the last few days, what the hell it's all over, no need to hide now, Yvonne, Vanessa, Mary Lou, going to work at carnivals across California, Pablo, watching Yvonne go with one hand over his heart and a look of hurt in his eyes hardly concealed by his smile, "Sea hombre, Pablo!" Saul teasing him, Araceli, who worked concessions and is going back home to Veracruz, Mexico, to live with her sisters, it is time, the savings are good enough, Edith, in the office, Jose Ivan's mother, who doesn't know what they'll do yet, the Venezuelans and the Argentinians left last night and Andrea came by too, an endless series of goodbyes, more heart wrenching than we would have ever thought. Estas despedidas son horribles. My husband, like most men I know, doesn't put his feelings into words if he can avoid it; for this he couldn't.
We drove up from Circus Chimera's last stop, in Newark, near San Jose, to El Cerrito, across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. Richard is kind enough to let us stay in the parking lot of his office/Playland kingdom. Fridman hooked up the light and water lines and was off in a rush, tio Tito had come to get him in one of the circus' vans, they were waiting for them down in Newark to hit the road back to Texas. He's driving one of the trucks back to the winter quarters in Rio Hondo, on the Mexican border where we started in February, and will be flying back hopefully in no more than a week. They must be on a highway somewhere in Southern California as I write these lines.

Adios, Circus Chimera.

July 2, Newark.

The permanence of things.

July 2, Newark.

Jim arrived on Saturday. Yesterday Fridman talked to him and he told me he looked sad. "I come from my mother's funeral and now here's the funeral of my circus." Jim's mother died suddenly earlier this year.
There is a part of us that resists endings. I can't quite believe the reality of the circus closing yet, that after the two shows today they'll dismantle the tent and everybody will be on their way, just like that. Even in the most impermanent of situations, like working and living in a traveling circus, the idea of the permanence of things is always so enticing, so compelling.

(More) last views.

July 2, Newark.

This morning I woke up early, even before Peanut, and went out to take pictures of the tent; tonight they take it down and I'll never look out at it again.
I've always liked that view, something quiet, settling about it.
(Somebody else was out an about; one of the deaf-mutes, Agustin or Arturo, I couldn't tell, probably coming back from the restrooms outside.)

Last view.

July 2, Newark.

We had to move the trailer shortly after I took the Trailer with a View picture on Friday, because the electricity cable wouldn't reach. The set up is different from the traditional one at this location, it is the same lot as last year, a mall parking lot, but they gave us less space so Fridman had to fit all the trailers very tightly together and the result is that they're all in odd places; we're parked right next to Martin's ponies, the tent truck is on the other side, and the performers' trailers behind that. The cookhouse and the rest of the trailers are on the opposite side of the tent.
So this is what we've really been looking at these past few days.

Goodbyes.

July 1, Newark.

There had to be a goodbye party.
Richard arranged it, as Richard does, and brought his friends. Lots of food, lots of cake, and lots of cup cakes with too much icing, somehow short on ambiance. Saul was right, the "cherverza" was missing - without booze people don't really unwind, do they. So it was people sitting around the tent ring and in the seats above, in small groups, eating and talking, and there was Dylan running around looking cute, what else, in his big boy jeans which kept falling, making him look like a mini rapper from the kiddie corner hood.
Friends of the circus (and our friends) Terri and Linda, from the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, came by for the party and stopped at the trailer, arms full of presents. Terri had just returned from a visit to her parents' homeland, in the Azores island of Portugal, she spoke softly in Portuguese to Nicolas. She told me she thought seriously about quitting her job and moving over there, an old great aunt needs help, and I saw the longing in her eyes and it was a familiar one. Of course I think she should just go, but then I should know, having collected more different addresses in my life than an army brat.
As the party wound down there were lots of pictures taken, too, the kind you take when you know you're going away and you're not going to see people again soon, or maybe ever.

(From left) Pablito, Goyo and Alexela.

Ten years and three days left.

June 29, Newark.

So this is it. Last set up. Last time this morning the tent was raised, last time the circus rose from the depth of trucks by bare arms, stake after stake, board after board, tent and seats and everything in between and around, on Monday they'll take it down and there will be no more Circus Chimera.
Ten years of sweat and joy, of routines and thrills, of friendships and love and fights and laughs, ten years of hard work, seven days a week and ten months a year, ten years of ups and downs and the down finally won but it's the good times you'll remember, the full houses, the cheering, the awe of the circus. Ten years and three days left.
It was like family after all, Circus Chimera, Circus Chismera they call it, a play on words, "chisme" meaning gossip in Spanish. I'll miss my circus family, all these people I've come to know, I'll miss the road and the late nights, but I won't miss the cold and the heat and the fatigue, nor all the ugly lots, like the last one, and I'll miss even less the cookhouse food (but I'll miss tio Tito, the cookhouse manager.)
The electricity is about to be cut, I'll rush and post this (I won't miss that either.)

Saul waiving.

A trailer with a (last) view.

June 29, Newark, California.

The ants.

June 27, Vacaville.

They've been dogging me since Texas. The ants.
They trek around my kitchen, a solitary soldier mostly, only rarely a group of them, and I squash them and there's another one, and another one, endlessly they appear, unfathomably, one after the other and here's another, but where are they coming from, an under-keyed invasion, they keep coming, here's another taking a stroll on Peanut's pajamas, and one on the kitchen counter, the solitary searchers, since I left Texas they've been here, coming from the depths of the trailer or from outside I do not know, did I provide a free pass to Texas ants to go west or are these locals quick to the task?
Le mystere reste entier.

Welcome to the city of Vacaville.

June 27, Vacaville.

The city of Vacaville police are an interesting case of 21st-century small town fascism, made in the U.S.A.
Yesterday, the first day here, all performers are laborers were summoned to the cookhouse to have their picture taken, jail mug shot style, and their passport checked by the local police. Later on they came back with badges bearing the City of Vacaville police seal (a deceptively sunny logo,) "Special Event Permit, Circus Chimera, each person's Name, Expires 6-28-07," and the aforementioned picture. The reason officially given was that "vagrants" and other undesirable people had infiltrated traveling shows staying in the city.
So it seems you need a permit to stay if you don't own a home here. I didn't know it was a crime not to own a home, whether because you're homeless, or a transient, or simply traveling through, in the United States or in any other self-described democracies. Isn't this "a free country," as is often claimed (the meaning of this another debate altogether)? The badge of course makes one think of the uber-infamous token of identification, the yellow star Nazi Germany made all Jews wear.
Vagrants, homeless, gypsies, untouchables, circus people, the faces change, the societies change, but always it's the Others, whoever they are, the old human frailty born of ignorance and fear. We don't exactly know who you are but we don't like you.

Spikes and screams.

June 26, Vacaville.

The lot is full of tiny razor-sharp spikes, so taking Dylan out to walk around is not possible. Just stepping out of the trailer is out of the question. One feels like a fakir walking on a bed of nails. This is one of those lots that makes you rejoice over the circus closing.
Dylan is going to miss the last couple of days, when Peanut, he and I were spending time by the performers' entrance at the back of the circus, during the last shows, when the heat has waned and it's nice being out, and there Dylan ran and danced and played, with Jose Ivan and the performers, and it was a joy watching him, his boundless energy, his glee, the expressions on his face.
No such thing here, the poor kid's been cooped up all day and by early evening the wailing and the screaming was reaching burn-out levels, for both of us.
Two more days of this.

Chinese performer, "Rawhide" lasso act, June 25.

A trailer with a view.

June 26, Vacaville, California.

The circus.

June 25, Pleasant Hill.

A week to go and circus life is over.
Some of the Mexican laborers are going to work for carnivals. Some are going back to Mexico. Another circus may open, no details, no set date, no more than conjectures and rumors.
I've often wondered why the modern circus is confused with carnivals. I found the answer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, under "carnival" states: "A traveling entertainment combining the features of both circus and amusement park (...) developing out of the same roots as the early 19th-century circus - the 'mud shows'."
No confusion then, circus and carnival are in a sense the same thing. But the modern circus has evolved so much since its mud show ancestor that the two can barely be compared today. The ongoing similarities: they are both traveling entertainment. One day here, the next gone, although circuses in the United States nowadays tend to stay in one place for much less time than the carnivals do, and some, like the Carson and Barnes circus, travel from town to town each and every day.
And here the similitude ends. For a circus is an artistic creation, not just an entertainment business. At its best it is acrobatics, dance and visual art combined - and sometimes, in the elegance of a gesture, the confluence of inspiration and the perfection of a routine's execution, in a fleeting moment, an etat de grace*. The circus is a performer's creation, a creation born of the body enabled, in sweat and repetition, in someone's perseverance and sore muscles and blisters, and as such it is like all performing arts.
Like all other performing arts it is ephemeral and transient. Only it takes this fugacious state and makes it its essence. The circus performance is there for you to see today, the circus tent is there, imposing, yet in a few hours it is gone, like a figure drawn in the sand, impermanent, passing, like a Buddhist's trick.
Tomorrow we'll be gone, and gone for good. Circus Chimera, "A Creation of the Imagination," is shutting down, not just passing on.
But it is, too.

*A state of grace.

You said what?

June 23, Pleasant Hill.

Last year's chicken.

June 22, Pleasant Hill.

Last year here morning sickness kicked in; Nicolas was on his way. I remember eating a rotisserie chicken bought at the Safeway down the street, my usual pregnancy sure thing symptom.
He's asleep in his rocker now.
(Here was where we did the Crazy Show last year too.)

Roadside religion.

June 22, Pleasant Hill.

On Route 4 near Brentwood, a church sign: "Let us pray for you, submit your request at www.deltachurch.org."

A trailer with a view (next to last one.)

June 22, Pleasant Hill, California.

A trailer with a view.

June 19, Brentwood, California.

This is the kind of landscape I had in mind when I started the Trailer with a View shots, the kind of landscape I was looking at in town after town last year, especially before we hit California, suburbia spreading, towns expanding into the seemingly endless land, a new mall, dirt fields turning into more shopping opportunities, open country about to be covered by more new homes, next year this lot will not be available anymore and somebody will be living in my trailer's backyard.
Except of course now there will be no next year.

Uncertainties.

June 18, Antioch.

No more Circus Chimera. Everybody in the circus was flabbergasted, we're all a little dazed now. More than ten years wiped off with a few words, in a few minutes.
The future, which lay for months ahead in innumerable drives and towns and states, California for a while more, then Oregon and Washington, New Mexico and back to Texas, in show after show, in good weather and bad, in good lots and terrible ones, the shifting and routine future of the traveling circus, the future is now looming wide and uncertain, a vague threat.
For us there is nothing solid, just a void to be filled, quickly. The days are counted.
I wanted to postpone going back to work full-time until Nicolas was a year old and breastfeed him all the while, as happened for Dylan, but that may not be possible now, and I feel immensely sad. But things can turn out for the best; the only certainty is that everything can change at the drop of a (circus) hat.

My husband, the clown.

June 17, Antioch.

Fridman Torales Rios, acrobat, clown, assistant show manager and then some, truck driver. Going to work, Circus Chimera, 1:30 PM show.

And again.

June 17, Antioch.

Again.

June 17, Antioch.

Dylan.

June 17, Antioch.

Here, along with Peanut bien sur, is the most important thing among all the turmoil.

Peanut talks.

June 17, Antioch.

Speaking of families, we have lengthy talks, two-month-old Peanut and I, and laughs too. In the quiet morning hours before Dylan wakes up, we talk and talk. He's a talker, my Peanut, and such a flirt. I can't believe he's so beautiful.
After a period of restlessness that unfortunately coincided with our road trip, he's also turned into a wonderfully "good" baby, sage comme une image, "How do you keep him so quiet?" asked Richard the other day when we visited and Peanut was in the car seat being shuffled around without so much as uttering a peep; he nurses and kicks and talks awhile and then falls asleep, and if he fusses at all, a swaddle, a gentle rocking and maybe a totote to the rescue will do the trick in no time.
Thus the days fly by.

Late breaking news.

June 16, Antioch.

The circus is closing in two weeks.
Not a word of explanation, nothing, just Roy going from performer to performer during the last show. Looks like we're all going to have to scramble and find other plans to feed our families.

Bundles.

June 16, Antioch.

Looking for examples of Navajo cradle carrying online.
In a Walmart store in Gallup, New Mexico, during a mid-day stop on our road trip to California my mother spotted a woman carrying her baby all bundled up and ran to me: "Not only was the baby swaddled, he was all laced up!" I've wanted to look it up ever since.
Most if not all the people I know think it's vaguely barbarous to swaddle your baby like this, although they also remember how their grandparents used to do it. The combination of swaddling and/or carrying in a sling close to the body can be found in cultures all around the world since times immemorial, and for obvious reasons: the baby is reminded of the womb and thus soothed and calmed, the mother can carry him/her easier and go on with her tasks. Dona Maigo's mother in Brazil; Alexela's mother in Mexico, the old Albanian aunt in the Ismail Kadare novel I'm reading, what was surely a Navajo Indian woman at Walmart in New Mexico, those of us sharing in what appears to be the latest hip-Mom fad are only going back full circle, following the trail she in the wisdom of her people never left.

A trailer with a view.

June 16, Antioch.

(Not posted yesterday - see previous post.)

Pains and saints.

June 15, Antioch, California.

It wasn't a bad cold, it was an acutely severe case of either strep throat or tonsil inflammation, we're not quite sure; what is sure is that I've never seen Fridman like this, never seen him sick like this, he's rarely sick at all as it is, never seen him not work, never seen him double over and cry in pain. He didn't work yesterday, except for helping with the parking, although he did try to get up for the show.
Again Norma saved me. She'd offered to help- her husband is a cardiologist, they know their way around the medical world, - if we ever needed to find a doctor in the area; as Fridman grew worse by the hour yesterday I decided to call her. It is the big throwback of life on the road, not knowing where to go when one of us is ill, especially the children; it is hard enough to find a good physician anywhere, much more at the drop of a hat not knowing anybody or anything in town. We went up to Napa, and hour drive from Antioch, and ended up having her husband himself see Fridman.
A heavy does of penicilin and narcotic pain killers later he's at long last feeling a little better. So he went back to work; not to the doors, he's too contagious, not doing the upside down walk, for that would most probably leave me with two orphan boys to raise, but the clown acts.
And that's the beauty of life on the road with the circus, the friends you make, and sometimes when you need them most.

An end note: I thought my father, who died of cancer in November 2002, was difficult when he was sick, which was often in the last years of his life; nothing like Fridman, who acted as if I bore the responsibility of the pain he was in. I though my Mom was a saint for taking care of my father all these years; I didn't know how much it took to be a saint (as if on cue Nicolas was fussy all day and Dylan the toddler from hell; it's a long, hard way to sainthood.)

Three acts.

June 14, Pittsburg.

Act One -12:30 PM.
It was already hot at six thirty, when Nicolas woke me up; by eight it was 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) in the trailer. They didn't turn on the generator until nine thirty. The temperature got down to 82 (28 Celsius) after an hour of air-conditionned on low, to spare the network.
It's too hot to take Dylan outside so he's been cooped up in the 150-and-some square feet of space that make up our home all morning, and he's getting wilder by the minute, running up and down the length of the main room - 15 feet, tops - and still he's been up since seven and doesn't look like he's going to take a nap any time soon.
Act Two - 3 PM.
Dylan climbed up next to his Dad, looked at me and pointed at his diaper, I changed him, he climbed right back up there and crashed within seconds.
Act Three - 3:30 PM.
We just learnt there will be only one show today, at 7:30, no doubt because of the heat, which has reached unbearable highs. It's 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius) in the trailer, and we now have the air on high. Not the day to be sick. Fridman's been down all day with what appears to be a severe cold and sore throat. It started yesterday and with pain killers he felt a little better; today he's been so sick he can't swallow even water and winces in pain. When he tried to eat soup earlier he started crying.
I'm taking care of three men today.

More on water.

June 13, Pittsburg.

This is what I like about living on the road, living in a circus: the necessary thrift, everything is counted thus everything becomes precious - but it was always precious, somewhere down the road to modernity we just forgot it. Water is but one thing that you learn to use wisely. Water tanks, both clean and used, are small and emptying them is always costly; you have to find a dumping place and then find the time to dump on the way to the next destination, and there isn't always a site close by. Wasting water is not an option. You close the tab when you brush your teeth (I never understood why it was needed to have the water running while you do that; the energy to turn it off too much to ask?) but also when you wash your hands, between soaping up and rinsing, or the dishes; toilets don't use much water as they don't have a fresh-water tank attached. We still use a lot of water compared to a family in Africa, but a hell of a lot less than your average North American household.
Electricity is just as precious. The generator is shut off at night , and most people do not have their own private one to turn on. It's usually back on around nine, and because the heating system doesn't work in my old trailer, on a cold morning the temperature is the same inside as it is outside, and this morning it was hot. You learn to cope, and to view electric light as what it is, miraculous, and costly, just like pretty much everything else in our sophisticated, technology-driven world this side of the North/South divide.

An old generator.

June 13, Pittsburg.

It's close to a hundred degrees here today, simply miserable.
Roy being away, Fridman took it upon himself as assistant manager to shorten the show. There was about 25 people in the audience. I'm surprised that many came out to seat in a sweltering tent for tan hour and a half.
The break our trailer is connected to keeps shutting off because with every trailer using air-conditionning at full balst there's a surcharge in the circus network. The circus generator is not the best either; it used to be at the Carson and Barnes Circus, they sold it to Jim because it was old; that was ten years ago. That Jay and the electric crew keep it going is a tribute to their ingenuity.

No water - much like the rest of the world.

June 12, Pittsburg.

Water access was restricted in Martinez because of an incident in the past when runoff water was spilled into the lot by one of the trailer and the circus was fined; by the time we thought of filling the water tank there was no water, and the tank was good and empty. Chance has it, of course, that here in Pittsburg there is so far no water either, this time because of problems with the city pipes into the lot. So it's now 5:30 in the afternoon and we haven't had water all day, no showers, no dishwashing, no water to clean the babies or to wash one's hands, not a drop.
Just like 40 percent of the world population, actually, people who have to walk miles to get water, and pay a high cost for it, who carry it back in a bucket, as Fridman's family did when he was growing up in Peru, people who have to wash in the river, hot or cold, who spare each drop of what they have. We have grown so spoiled, turning on the magical faucet, and in so many other ways. Water is precious, and it's running out.
I thought living on the road was going to be a grinding ordeal and it turned out to be nothing of the kind, water or no water. There are difficulties, but they are laughable compared to what goes on for those millions of women in the rest of the world scraping a living and trying to raise their family in unsanitary and unsafe conditions.
Life on the road is a breeze.

More on the Crazy Show.

June 12, Pittsburg, California.

Yesterday afternoon I lay down opposite Dylan on the couch to get him to nap but fell asleep before he did; too many nights staying up too late on top of too many short nights and my body simply refused to go on and shut off like an engine out of gas. We slept all afternoon. It was but an extreme version of a typical morning; getting up when Peanut wakes me, usually around seven thirty, I struggle to open my eyes and gather the strength to move.
No time to write more than a cursory word on the Crazy Show then, so here are the crunchy details.
Goyo, Ivan, Pancho, Calimba, el Chupadito, Marcos, Rafa, Chavo et les autres did the dancers, and Goyo most of the performers' sidekick, Saul did Raul's juggling act, one of the dancers' rope acts and the Andrea part of the roller-skate act, Raul did the cowboy whip act (the act was added to the show over the week end; it is performed by one of the Chinese boys and Vanessa, the Chinese boy as cowboy a quixotic and rather hilarious sight,) and dances, and Fridman another of the dancers' rope act and the other Gino part of the roller-skate act. Rafa's aide, I have to ask him how to spell his name, I'd rather not botch it, did a hulla hoop act and the balancing act one of the Chinese girls did last week to replace the roller-skating act after Andrea fell and couldn't perform for a few days; he was supposed to try some contortions but fell flat on his face off the table before he could even move, one of the best laughs of the night, if unintentional. Chavo did the main part of the malambo, El Chupadito did Raul's contortion, climbing into a cardboard box, dressed in a leotard with muscle outlines. The calendar "girls" wore diapers and various versions of beer boxes art on their heads.
One of Richard's friend told Fridman that Angelo, who worked with Chimera when the circus was first started, made a beautiful woman impersonator, but that he was a strong runner-up. He did look great with make-up and wig, I think he'd make a dazzling transvestite. Some of the crew guys that performed in the show are gay (Goyo, Rafa.) That they be willing to brave the cliches of gay men who like to wear dresses and come up to perform in the Crazy Show, living in an intensely homophobic world as they do - as can be expected in a Latin American blue-collar men's world, - is as remarkable as it is laudable.
Hats off to Goyo and Rafa then, it was a riot of a show.

Calendar Girls: (from left) Fridman, Raul, Goyo, Calimba, Pancho, Ivan and Marcos.

A trailer with (not much of) a view.

June 12, Pittsburg, California.

Crazy Show, 2007.

June 11, Martinez.

Crazy show last night, the annual Circus Chimera spoof (see the August 13th post of last year.)
I'll have to check how it got started, who's behind it, the what, where, why of it, because I don't know of any other circuses in this country that do it. Several guys from the crew, Ivan, Rafa, the cook, Goyo, Pancho, Calimba, el Chupadito and others, impersonating the performers, performers impersonating other performers, Saul, Raul and Fridman, nobody was spared.
Goyo was everywhere as one of the dancers and he was great, a natural; Calimba, as a clown, wasn't bad either.
Those are not their real names but the nickname they go by; I doubt anybody knows their real names except maybe Armando because he handles the pay and this gets to see the official side of things.

Candyman dance: (from left) Rafa, Fridman, Marcos and Goyo.
Finale.

I'm not a monster.

Thank you, Norma.
Norma Quintana is a photographer, like me, although these days I mostly tend to forget I was ever a photojournalist, ever somebody else than a walking milk supply, happy meal cook, all-purpose maid, small event organizer, truck driver and toddler theatrics and song master, ever somewhere other than in a 29-foot trailer parked at the back of a circus in a lot after another that look like the last one, ever feeling other than exhausted and under-appreciated, unworthy and misunderstood, ever feeling other than ignorant of the rest of the world stretching with the sweet glowing aura of the unattainable outside the confines of my 18-month-old's round eyes and two-month-old toothless smile, ever somebody else than a full-time Mom with a double stroller and a minivan, ever someone other than a sometimes totally desperate trailer wife.
Norma came by yesterday and we talked. I love visits, they're like a window into the world of normal people living normal lives out there. They also provide entertainment, like going to the movies, which is one of the things I never can do anymore.
Norma and I talked about the circus, of course, she's been photographing Circus Chimera for a long time and we toy with joint projects, and then about motherhood too - she just adopted a three-year-old girl from China after raising her own two children, now grown, - and that's when she made me sane again. What she told me about taking care of her two babies back then made me breathe a deep, long-held sigh of relief. All this time I thought I was a monster for wanting kids and then sometimes resenting this strange new sidelined life, resenting the fact that I couldn't do much anymore while my husband went on having a good time as usual, for wanting kids and then crying with frustration over them and my freedom past, for missing my work so much, for feeling guilty over not feeling happy, ecstatic and oh so wonderful about being a mother, as everybody kept saying I should, and they grow up so fast, enjoy it!, and here I was and time seemed to have ground down to an agonizingly slow succession of endless housebound days.
Turns out I wasn't entirely alone.

And again.

June 8, Martinez.

Again.

June 8, Martinez.

Beau comme Apollon.

June 8, Martinez.

That's what it says on his shirt, "As beautiful as Apollo."

A trailer with a view.

June 8, Martinez.

Late nights.

June 8, Martinez, California.

I did it again. I arranged for a surprise birthday dinner for Fridman at Angelo's sister's house on Wednesday night after the show and the sky was getting light by the time I drove into the lot; I didn't look at the clock but it must have been close to five in the morning.
Two days later I am still paying.

Investor's little fixer!

Investor's little fixer!
June 6, Benicia.

Today is Fridman's birthday; he turns 29. The dancers gave him a shirt; we went out for brunch.
It's been warm but not too much in the day and cool at night, the perfect mall-temperature type weather. The location is near perfect too. The circus has never been in this town and I hope they like us ok so we can come back. We couldn't ask for a better lot, although bigger would be better; not only is it one of these above-mentioned flat grass lots, the grass is so lush it feels as if you were walking on carpet. The lot is surrounded by trees, pine trees and palm trees and redwoods and many others I don't know the name of along the streets; we are in the middle of town, within walkable distance of shops, and a nice little town it is, too (I took up a real estate brochure on a stroll with the kids yesterday; an ugly house the size of my trailer, "Investor's little fixer!" sets you back "just $315,000.")