October 18, Richmond, Missouri (37 miles, fairgrounds.)
Monday, October 18, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Truck trouble.
October 17, Hamilton.
Steve had yet more truck problems on this morning drive. It it close to nine o'clock and I'm still waiting for Fridman and Castro to arrive.
Steve had yet more truck problems on this morning drive. It it close to nine o'clock and I'm still waiting for Fridman and Castro to arrive.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
The silver lining of the cloud.
October 16, Brunswick.
In my home town of Columbia, Missouri, nobody came to the circus.
We had no sponsor here so I had let all my friends know about it but that clearly was not enough; nobody had heard anything about it until I told them, not on the radio, not in the newspapers, no posters, no flyers, nothing, and nobody came, naturally. I so wanted it to be a success.
But it was, because all the people I had invited to see the show were thrilled by it, and one of them, a woman from Belgium who founded a school in Columbia, said it was the best circus show she remembered seeing, much better than Ringling (of course I happen to think the same.)
And I got a kick out of seeing Bill, a mathematics genius who teaches at the University of Missouri, laugh at Harlond's long-running joke, "the Harlond special" (two bags of peanuts for three dollars when one costs a dollar fifty - he must have been delighted to do it again, like old times) Bill and his wife, Asma, who is from Morocco and another math professor at the university, are the kind of people who made me feel as if I had known them my whole life the day I met them, back in April. I only wish we had had more time than a lightning visit at the circus. We invited them over to our trailer to share in Brian's dinner and they left asking us to give their compliments to the chef.
Dinner and a show, world class, that's the Kelly Miller Circus.
In my home town of Columbia, Missouri, nobody came to the circus.
We had no sponsor here so I had let all my friends know about it but that clearly was not enough; nobody had heard anything about it until I told them, not on the radio, not in the newspapers, no posters, no flyers, nothing, and nobody came, naturally. I so wanted it to be a success.
But it was, because all the people I had invited to see the show were thrilled by it, and one of them, a woman from Belgium who founded a school in Columbia, said it was the best circus show she remembered seeing, much better than Ringling (of course I happen to think the same.)
And I got a kick out of seeing Bill, a mathematics genius who teaches at the University of Missouri, laugh at Harlond's long-running joke, "the Harlond special" (two bags of peanuts for three dollars when one costs a dollar fifty - he must have been delighted to do it again, like old times) Bill and his wife, Asma, who is from Morocco and another math professor at the university, are the kind of people who made me feel as if I had known them my whole life the day I met them, back in April. I only wish we had had more time than a lightning visit at the circus. We invited them over to our trailer to share in Brian's dinner and they left asking us to give their compliments to the chef.
Dinner and a show, world class, that's the Kelly Miller Circus.
Visitors.
October 15, Columbia.
Harlond and his wife, Marcella, visited the circus yesterday from their home in Fulton, a few miles north. Marcella was telling us he drives her crazy with wanting to travel with the circus again, in spite of his health problems.
Harlond and his wife, Marcella, visited the circus yesterday from their home in Fulton, a few miles north. Marcella was telling us he drives her crazy with wanting to travel with the circus again, in spite of his health problems.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Remembering Jo.
October 12, Ellsberry.
Another by-product of reading The New Yorker this morning was remembering my friend Jo.
Jo Kaufmann was a simple copy editor but I always thought there was much more to her, without seizing the chance to find out. I was a kid, really, and she was my family on this side of the Atlantic, my new home. I was looking for a room to rent in New York one summer when someone, I forget who, put us in contact. She lived in a u-shaped apartment on the Upper West Side, on 93th Street and Central Park West, and sublet two bedrooms to foreign students, whom she sometimes befriended to the point where they became like her children, much to her own children's disapproval, as I learned later (there might have been jealousy.) I became one of these; the liking was mutual and instantaneous.
A few years later I think it was her daughter who called to say she had died. I felt cheated, the world lonelier without her intelligence and wit (but the first and only time my father spoke to her on the phone he told her a joke she did not appreciate and was hence relegated to the forbidden place of people Jo did not like and were therefore never mentioned in her presence; my poor father never understood what had happened.)
It was the summer of 1988 and I had found work in a Washington Square coffee shop on a temporary student working visa. It was my second visit to New York, the one when I fell in love with the city, and Jo had a lot to do with it. Don't you love it here, she would say, not a question but an affirmation, as if there was no other possible way to feel about her adopted home.
Jo was related to the Freud family, the founder of psychoanalysis, and cousin to Lucian Freud, the famous British painter. She was born and raised in Germany and emigrated shortly before World War II, first to England and ultimately to the United States. Some time during this exile route she was married, but by the time I met her her husband was not around.
I write this struggling to patch together the few fragments of what she told me I still remember, and wishing the kid that I was would have taken the time to sit down with her and learn much more. In truth I did think about interviewing her even back then; my mentor and the grandfather I never had, Paul Lambert, a painter, had committed suicide a few years earlier, leaving me with the bitter regret of not having asked him to tell me his life in his own words - all the way back then the pull to try and enshrine a person through their words, to archive the details of experience, to delve into the lives of the ones I love as if it might help stave off the inevitable void into which I felt they were bound to disappear too soon, too suddenly, leaving no trace but in my memory, ephemeral, unreliable.
Pauls' wife, Helene, died of breast cancer; Paul killed himself a few years later; Jo died of heart failure, and their story died with them.
I remember sitting in Jo's kitchen drinking tea and eating Pepperidge Farm bread, which she introduced me to as if it were a delicacy. The kitchen was painted entirely bright yellow and its window gave onto a narrow back court full of rusty fire escapes. I don't remember the color of the other rooms, but in my memory they are an invisible cream white. What I remember is Jo sitting at the tiny kitchen table with me, peppering me with questions about my day, always taking the opportunity to celebrate the city with me, an exile's zeal. What I remember is Jo sitting at the big table in the living room right off the kitchen, working on a manuscript, surrounded by dictionaries and books and pages and pages, and the coffee table at the other end of the room, where I would sit, with a pile of New Yorker magazines on it, and the window sills with meager plants trying to survive the scorching summer heat, and the shelf full of books on the end wall.
The process of writing sometimes brings back memories, like people walking slowly out the shadows.
There was a Chinese restaurant she liked to go to, at the end of the block on Columbus Avenue, and sometimes we would go there together, as the time, on a short visit to the city in later years, when I met her in her apartment to walk to the restaurant together. She walked with difficulty, being overweight and riddled with health problems (of which I never dare to ask.) One night on that initial stay with her, one of what would be many, she invited me to her bedroom, a tiny room immediately by the front door, to watch opera on television. Her bedroom was forbidden territory, by an unspoken rule, as we were expected to respect each other's privacy above anything else.
She loved opera, and dance, and theater, she was passionate about literature and the English language (how I wish she could read over my shoulder now,) she was to me the ultimate New Yorker, the embodiment of the many East European Jews who came to flourish in this country after fleeing Hitler's crimes.
Every visit to New York after she died has left me with a disappointing feeling. It took me a long time to recognize she was missing from the city, and that the city she inhabited would never be returned to me. It has disappeared just as entirely as she has.
Another by-product of reading The New Yorker this morning was remembering my friend Jo.
Jo Kaufmann was a simple copy editor but I always thought there was much more to her, without seizing the chance to find out. I was a kid, really, and she was my family on this side of the Atlantic, my new home. I was looking for a room to rent in New York one summer when someone, I forget who, put us in contact. She lived in a u-shaped apartment on the Upper West Side, on 93th Street and Central Park West, and sublet two bedrooms to foreign students, whom she sometimes befriended to the point where they became like her children, much to her own children's disapproval, as I learned later (there might have been jealousy.) I became one of these; the liking was mutual and instantaneous.
A few years later I think it was her daughter who called to say she had died. I felt cheated, the world lonelier without her intelligence and wit (but the first and only time my father spoke to her on the phone he told her a joke she did not appreciate and was hence relegated to the forbidden place of people Jo did not like and were therefore never mentioned in her presence; my poor father never understood what had happened.)
It was the summer of 1988 and I had found work in a Washington Square coffee shop on a temporary student working visa. It was my second visit to New York, the one when I fell in love with the city, and Jo had a lot to do with it. Don't you love it here, she would say, not a question but an affirmation, as if there was no other possible way to feel about her adopted home.
Jo was related to the Freud family, the founder of psychoanalysis, and cousin to Lucian Freud, the famous British painter. She was born and raised in Germany and emigrated shortly before World War II, first to England and ultimately to the United States. Some time during this exile route she was married, but by the time I met her her husband was not around.
I write this struggling to patch together the few fragments of what she told me I still remember, and wishing the kid that I was would have taken the time to sit down with her and learn much more. In truth I did think about interviewing her even back then; my mentor and the grandfather I never had, Paul Lambert, a painter, had committed suicide a few years earlier, leaving me with the bitter regret of not having asked him to tell me his life in his own words - all the way back then the pull to try and enshrine a person through their words, to archive the details of experience, to delve into the lives of the ones I love as if it might help stave off the inevitable void into which I felt they were bound to disappear too soon, too suddenly, leaving no trace but in my memory, ephemeral, unreliable.
Pauls' wife, Helene, died of breast cancer; Paul killed himself a few years later; Jo died of heart failure, and their story died with them.
I remember sitting in Jo's kitchen drinking tea and eating Pepperidge Farm bread, which she introduced me to as if it were a delicacy. The kitchen was painted entirely bright yellow and its window gave onto a narrow back court full of rusty fire escapes. I don't remember the color of the other rooms, but in my memory they are an invisible cream white. What I remember is Jo sitting at the tiny kitchen table with me, peppering me with questions about my day, always taking the opportunity to celebrate the city with me, an exile's zeal. What I remember is Jo sitting at the big table in the living room right off the kitchen, working on a manuscript, surrounded by dictionaries and books and pages and pages, and the coffee table at the other end of the room, where I would sit, with a pile of New Yorker magazines on it, and the window sills with meager plants trying to survive the scorching summer heat, and the shelf full of books on the end wall.
The process of writing sometimes brings back memories, like people walking slowly out the shadows.
There was a Chinese restaurant she liked to go to, at the end of the block on Columbus Avenue, and sometimes we would go there together, as the time, on a short visit to the city in later years, when I met her in her apartment to walk to the restaurant together. She walked with difficulty, being overweight and riddled with health problems (of which I never dare to ask.) One night on that initial stay with her, one of what would be many, she invited me to her bedroom, a tiny room immediately by the front door, to watch opera on television. Her bedroom was forbidden territory, by an unspoken rule, as we were expected to respect each other's privacy above anything else.
She loved opera, and dance, and theater, she was passionate about literature and the English language (how I wish she could read over my shoulder now,) she was to me the ultimate New Yorker, the embodiment of the many East European Jews who came to flourish in this country after fleeing Hitler's crimes.
Every visit to New York after she died has left me with a disappointing feeling. It took me a long time to recognize she was missing from the city, and that the city she inhabited would never be returned to me. It has disappeared just as entirely as she has.
Mid-life musings.
October 12, Ellsberry.
After finishing reading The New Yorker over coffee this morning, "the Style Issue," replete with profiles of billionaire entrepreneurs and famous thirteen-year-old bloggers, an uneasy feeling of vague failure (albeit a fairly happy one) settled over me.
It is a familiar feeling, this feeling of failure, or rather of inadequacy, and not confined to the morning reading of The New Yorker, unfortunately. And time doesn't help it a bit, unfortunately unfortunately. It used to be that for what seemed like the longest time (forty being the new thirty) I was looking to the future, this "one day" territory where everything is possible and the sky is the limit, with trepidation, wild scenarios, and utter confidence, and then, in just a few years, that day is today (and fast threatening to be yesterday,) and all I've got to show is wrinkles and annoying gray hairs.
The familiar mid-life crisis then, how common (sigh.) And the truism of yes but you're raising the boys and isn't that enough is off the point, although it is also true, of course.
So is the opposite feeling, the joy of having come so far, seen so much, discovered that so much more was to be seen and learned, being able to enjoy each day as it comes, the perspective it brings.
I will never believe there is any more to us than this, this here and now I've finally learned to savor with grateful humility.
After finishing reading The New Yorker over coffee this morning, "the Style Issue," replete with profiles of billionaire entrepreneurs and famous thirteen-year-old bloggers, an uneasy feeling of vague failure (albeit a fairly happy one) settled over me.
It is a familiar feeling, this feeling of failure, or rather of inadequacy, and not confined to the morning reading of The New Yorker, unfortunately. And time doesn't help it a bit, unfortunately unfortunately. It used to be that for what seemed like the longest time (forty being the new thirty) I was looking to the future, this "one day" territory where everything is possible and the sky is the limit, with trepidation, wild scenarios, and utter confidence, and then, in just a few years, that day is today (and fast threatening to be yesterday,) and all I've got to show is wrinkles and annoying gray hairs.
The familiar mid-life crisis then, how common (sigh.) And the truism of yes but you're raising the boys and isn't that enough is off the point, although it is also true, of course.
So is the opposite feeling, the joy of having come so far, seen so much, discovered that so much more was to be seen and learned, being able to enjoy each day as it comes, the perspective it brings.
I will never believe there is any more to us than this, this here and now I've finally learned to savor with grateful humility.
The adventures of Radar on the road.
October 12, Ellsberry.
Radar was arrested this morning.
There was a warrant for him in the state of Missouri, his home state, for an unpaid ticket, so when he turned around in someone's yard after blowing the arrows the guy called the police and three sheriff's patrol cars descended on the gas station down the road where Casey was waiting for him and handcuffed him on the spot, hands on the wall, movie style.
The ticket was fifty dollars, and he says he'd paid it (he plans to fight in court.)
He never got to see the inside of a cell, though, Casey recounted later, visibly amused, and was out in time to arrive on the lot before nine o'clock, after posting bail, but he's now our official bandolero.
Ryan's off-road foray, Radar's way-off-road detour - who knew circus life could be that exciting, off ring.
The catch is, who's next?
Radar was arrested this morning.
There was a warrant for him in the state of Missouri, his home state, for an unpaid ticket, so when he turned around in someone's yard after blowing the arrows the guy called the police and three sheriff's patrol cars descended on the gas station down the road where Casey was waiting for him and handcuffed him on the spot, hands on the wall, movie style.
The ticket was fifty dollars, and he says he'd paid it (he plans to fight in court.)
He never got to see the inside of a cell, though, Casey recounted later, visibly amused, and was out in time to arrive on the lot before nine o'clock, after posting bail, but he's now our official bandolero.
Ryan's off-road foray, Radar's way-off-road detour - who knew circus life could be that exciting, off ring.
The catch is, who's next?
Monday, October 11, 2010
October (Dylan's.)
October 11, Warrenton.
At the bank the other day there were crayons and coloring pages with Halloween themes. Dylan made one each for Georgia, Gordo, his Dad and me.
This is Fridman's.
An accident.
October 11, Warrenton.
Ryan's motor home blew a tire on narrow highway 47 this morning and ended up in a ditch, dangerously close to overturning.
Three circus trucks were lined up along the road when I passed him, with Buckner and Josh waving by cars at either end, but soon had to leave so as not to obstruct traffic. The motor home had to be pulled all the way to the lot by a tow truck, which charged a surprisingly low rate.
You can't be completely out of luck.
Ryan's motor home blew a tire on narrow highway 47 this morning and ended up in a ditch, dangerously close to overturning.
Three circus trucks were lined up along the road when I passed him, with Buckner and Josh waving by cars at either end, but soon had to leave so as not to obstruct traffic. The motor home had to be pulled all the way to the lot by a tow truck, which charged a surprisingly low rate.
You can't be completely out of luck.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Friday, October 08, 2010
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Jacksonville again.
October 6, Taylorville.
There was Tiffany (with miraculous news but it is hers to tell,) Steve (renamed Mike by Dylan,) Zuzana (who is going through tough times and whom I admire so much for taking them on,) Liliana (indomitable Liliana, getting into politics now to save Jacksonville from the meanness and madness of Tea Party fanatics,) there were all my friends in Jacksonville again, it is my annual reunion, and there was little time but enough for a cornucopia of a brunch, seeing the show all together and even a late night swing by the newspaper we used to work for and saying hi to an old friend amid the smell of nostalgia, the smell of ink on paper, the smell of a dying craft.
There was Tiffany (with miraculous news but it is hers to tell,) Steve (renamed Mike by Dylan,) Zuzana (who is going through tough times and whom I admire so much for taking them on,) Liliana (indomitable Liliana, getting into politics now to save Jacksonville from the meanness and madness of Tea Party fanatics,) there were all my friends in Jacksonville again, it is my annual reunion, and there was little time but enough for a cornucopia of a brunch, seeing the show all together and even a late night swing by the newspaper we used to work for and saying hi to an old friend amid the smell of nostalgia, the smell of ink on paper, the smell of a dying craft.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Monday, October 04, 2010
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Falling flat.
October 2, Peru.
I find it increasingly hard to write, even read, and miss it so.
It may be the kids suck more air out of the trailer space now that they are bigger and more demanding, that they take more time out of the circus day, they or anything else, even though I've been studying Buddhist philosophies once again, with their present-moment focus, a few pages a day, stopping time, or trying to, and more often than not failing, miserably, only to be sucked again by the habit of rushing through air.
I find it hard to write, witness this note, full of the sound and fury of nothingness.
I find it increasingly hard to write, even read, and miss it so.
It may be the kids suck more air out of the trailer space now that they are bigger and more demanding, that they take more time out of the circus day, they or anything else, even though I've been studying Buddhist philosophies once again, with their present-moment focus, a few pages a day, stopping time, or trying to, and more often than not failing, miserably, only to be sucked again by the habit of rushing through air.
I find it hard to write, witness this note, full of the sound and fury of nothingness.
Friday, October 01, 2010
New scenery.
October 1, Marseilles.
The Poemas bought a motor home in the Chicago area and started traveling with it leaving St. Charles a couple of days ago. Nellie is going to drive the old one back to their home in Florida today, taking her uncle with her.
This morning the new motor home had electric problems and it took us a while to start off the lot. Then Adrian stopped to get gas so I went on solo. The empty country roads were sweet after the relentless Chicago traffic of the last month.
The Poemas bought a motor home in the Chicago area and started traveling with it leaving St. Charles a couple of days ago. Nellie is going to drive the old one back to their home in Florida today, taking her uncle with her.
This morning the new motor home had electric problems and it took us a while to start off the lot. Then Adrian stopped to get gas so I went on solo. The empty country roads were sweet after the relentless Chicago traffic of the last month.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
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