The Circus

I was thinking back to the time when we first moved into Hamilton Gardens, on the shore. I was probably 4 and Ted 5, so Maggie was a newborn. The Cape Cod we bought at 211 Elm Drive wasn't ready because of construction delays, so we stayed for that first summer in another identical Cape Cod, also on Elm Drive but a couple blocks away. When we moved into 211, our across-the-street neighbors were the Speakmans, but for that summer our across-the-street neighbors were the Gordons. The Gordons had a son and a daughter, and the son was a few years older than Ted. Dad and Mr. Gordon were friendly and we spent a fair amount of time with the Gordons that summer. I remember going on long hikes back through the swamps and over to a highway that was under construction; it may have been the Garden State, which ran close by. That was the halfway point of the hike, and we always ate sandwiches made of ground bologna and sweet pickles on white bread. Then we would hike back. It seems to me these hikes took all day, and I can remember being really tired, though I would not have given up a moment of this time. I remember Dad's brown canvas shoes. One day we heard that the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus was coming to town, and Ted and I begged Dad to take us to the circus. He said that he wasn't able to take us to the circus, but that he had something even better in mind. The next morning he woke us up when it was still dark, and piled us into the station wagon, where Mr. Gordon and his kids joined us. We drove down town and parked. We were still half asleep when the circus trucks and trailers started rolling by, each one full of some wild animal. I was mesmerized. My memory is a bit gauzy now, but I believe we saw the elephants go by, and also zebras and lions and lots of equipment. Dawn was breaking about this time, and it was all very magical. Even at 4 I suspected that this was not really better than the real circus, but by the time I figured out that we were too poor for tickets, I was old enough to love the fact that Dad tried to turn what would have been disappointment into something special for us.

That was 1952, and Dad was 28. He would have been 83 today.