I’ve always had an incredible long term memory. Aunts and Uncles have commented on it, amazed that I could recall a certain event or place, considering I was 3 years old at the time.
In the early winter of 1969 I was a couple of months from my fourth birthday. My brother and I shared a room, his crib was across from me and I would wake him up in the middle of the night on occasion to chat, though he could barely talk yet. I’ve always been a night owl.
On this particular night I was explaining to him, as he sat on my bed listening attentively, that the lights we saw glittering out our bedroom window in the distance were a Circus, and that one day him and I would go there and live.
One day we did. He and I traveled the road together for a number of years, looking out for one and other, growing from boys to men on the Midway. When he became a man he left, he had another calling, and he became a husband and a father and moved on. I stayed, it was my calling, and my idea after all.
My mother says that when I was little she had to watch me like a hawk; I was always taking off; trying to run away, get out of the yard, or run down the road to who the fuck knows where. I’m still doing it to this day.
There’s a place in the sun, where all questions are answered, and everyone gets along, where there is no struggle. That’s where we’re all headed; I’m just taking a shortcut.
