Rain Gryphon

So, Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows are shutting down. It's not a ploy to drive ticket sales for a "farewell tour" either. They were a huge part of American popular history, and I'm sad for the loss. At the same time, I'm amazed that they lasted as long as they did.

The circus really belongs to another time, before radio, certainly before television, when people looked to themselves and their neighbors for entertainment, and the arrival of the circus was not just something interesting, but something qualitatively out of the norm.

Even when I was a child, circuses were artifacts from the past. The cultural references were legion - books, movies, TV shows assumed the ubiquity and universal popularity of circuses, yet the real deal was something you never saw. They were like these pools of quicksand that people were always becoming trapped in on TV - they *should* be there as a part of daily life - all the stories say they should - yet they remained conspicuous in their absence.

Despite that, the circus remained universal as cultural iconography. The big top, the ringmaster, the elephants and the clowns kept popping up everywhere, generally when some local advertiser wanted to emphasize that *this* three-day sale was different from all others. THIS was the equivalent of the circus coming to town, a day when mundane life should stop, suspended in place, while the community rejoiced and renewed itself at the circus.

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I'm fortunate to have been to the circus, I suppose. That's an experience that a lot of people never had, and never will. When I was a very young child, and grown-ups used to tell me about things they remembered from the past that were gone now, I'd always feel so cheated out of the experience. I'm at that point in life myself, now, where I can recall so many things that used to be, but are no more. It's interesting to live one's life in the present, with an awareness of the fragments of the past that still surround us. Slowly, as I age, I develop a sense of the sweep of history, and slowly come to accept that it's the nature of things to move and change.

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Biggest surprise I ever got at the circus was one time, years ago, my mom took me to (IIRC) Cole Bros., and my great uncle Keith was playing in the band! He was on the alto sax, IIRC. The man was incredibly talented as a musician - he led the Army Band at Ft. Riley, KS, he played with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, albeit long after their heyday, and finally settled down as a high school band director and musical instrument repairman. He'd apparently been delivering a repaired instrument that day, and talked his way into playing in the band :)