was to forget about, soon enough.
I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning appointment to go to the bank, and to learn there, not to his surprise, that there was no extension to his loan, he had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn around and he had to find a new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at the same time. Or he may have found out that there was a name for my mother’s shakiness and that it was not going to stop. Or that he was in love with an impossible woman.
Never mind. From then on I could sleep.
RICHARD SCHMITT
Sometimes a Romantic Notion
FROM
The Gettysburg Review
A T SCHOOL TODAY an esteemed member of my department said his grandfather, at age eighteen, “ran off” to join a circus. I thought,
Why do people say it like that? Anyone who ever joined a circus seems to have run away to do it
. My colleague is a poet, a wordsmith, a teacher of language, trained to be precise and accurate. I asked him why he said “ran off.” “Was your grandfather a runaway? A fugitive of some kind?”
“Well, no,” he said. He didn’t know why he said “ran off.” “The romantic exotica we associate with circuses, I guess.”
We don’t say that about other institutions. No one says that they ran off to join a university, or a sports franchise, or a Fortune 500 company, but circus employees are deemed runaways. Even the word
employee
doesn’t jibe with public perception of circus workers. Circus people are not considered employed in the way one works for AT&T or Walmart. In a recent PBS documentary about New York’s Big Apple Circus, the initial segment was called “Run Away.” I can say for sure, because I know people on that show; very few of them, if any, are dyed-in-the-wool runaways. A few directionless young people? Sure. A middle-age crisis or two? Maybe. As
Washington Post
reviewer Hank Stuever said, “Though the dream may be very much intact as a metaphor for escaping life’s monotony, people don’t run away and join the circus much anymore.”
Did they ever? I have not mentioned to my colleagues that by the time I was seventeen, I had run away from home three times. It was not romantic. I lied about my age, worked shit jobs, paid rent on squalid apartments with degenerate roommates. No car, no girlfriend. One morning in 1970, riding in the back of a flatbed truck on the way to a job site, I saw the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train parked under an I-95 overpass in Providence, Rhode Island. The train was white. The train yard black. I was a brick washer then. I spent my days at a construction site with a hose and a wire brush, scrubbing dried cement off red bricks. Before that I had a job pulling bent nails from boards and pounding them straight with a hammer. Minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. My roommate was huddled in the back of the truck, a junkie, hugging himself and shivering, the wind roaring and whipping. I pointed down at the train yard. “A white train,” I yelled. The kid stared at me. He was drooling. All he heard was the word
white
.
After eight hours of brick scrubbing, blue jeans covered with red dust, I walked under the I-95 overpass, the steel stanchions droning with rush-hour traffic, and into the train yard. The white train was long, split in two sections, and lined up on parallel tracks. I walked between the cars on a concrete walkway receding to a common vanishing point. I looked in the windows and open vestibules. I saw a tanned woman in a gold thong lying on her stomach on a plastic chaise lounge, the folding kind you take to the beach; it was August, and she was gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. Beside her on the concrete was a can of Pepsi in a Styrofoam cooler, and next to that were the shining steel wheels of the train. I walked by in my brick-dust sneakers. She didn’t budge. I passed a small cast-iron barbecue grill and ducked under a makeshift clothesline with
I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning appointment to go to the bank, and to learn there, not to his surprise, that there was no extension to his loan, he had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn around and he had to find a new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at the same time. Or he may have found out that there was a name for my mother’s shakiness and that it was not going to stop. Or that he was in love with an impossible woman.
Never mind. From then on I could sleep.
RICHARD SCHMITT
Sometimes a Romantic Notion
FROM
The Gettysburg Review
A T SCHOOL TODAY an esteemed member of my department said his grandfather, at age eighteen, “ran off” to join a circus. I thought,
Why do people say it like that? Anyone who ever joined a circus seems to have run away to do it
. My colleague is a poet, a wordsmith, a teacher of language, trained to be precise and accurate. I asked him why he said “ran off.” “Was your grandfather a runaway? A fugitive of some kind?”
“Well, no,” he said. He didn’t know why he said “ran off.” “The romantic exotica we associate with circuses, I guess.”
We don’t say that about other institutions. No one says that they ran off to join a university, or a sports franchise, or a Fortune 500 company, but circus employees are deemed runaways. Even the word
employee
doesn’t jibe with public perception of circus workers. Circus people are not considered employed in the way one works for AT&T or Walmart. In a recent PBS documentary about New York’s Big Apple Circus, the initial segment was called “Run Away.” I can say for sure, because I know people on that show; very few of them, if any, are dyed-in-the-wool runaways. A few directionless young people? Sure. A middle-age crisis or two? Maybe. As
Washington Post
reviewer Hank Stuever said, “Though the dream may be very much intact as a metaphor for escaping life’s monotony, people don’t run away and join the circus much anymore.”
Did they ever? I have not mentioned to my colleagues that by the time I was seventeen, I had run away from home three times. It was not romantic. I lied about my age, worked shit jobs, paid rent on squalid apartments with degenerate roommates. No car, no girlfriend. One morning in 1970, riding in the back of a flatbed truck on the way to a job site, I saw the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train parked under an I-95 overpass in Providence, Rhode Island. The train was white. The train yard black. I was a brick washer then. I spent my days at a construction site with a hose and a wire brush, scrubbing dried cement off red bricks. Before that I had a job pulling bent nails from boards and pounding them straight with a hammer. Minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. My roommate was huddled in the back of the truck, a junkie, hugging himself and shivering, the wind roaring and whipping. I pointed down at the train yard. “A white train,” I yelled. The kid stared at me. He was drooling. All he heard was the word
white
.
After eight hours of brick scrubbing, blue jeans covered with red dust, I walked under the I-95 overpass, the steel stanchions droning with rush-hour traffic, and into the train yard. The white train was long, split in two sections, and lined up on parallel tracks. I walked between the cars on a concrete walkway receding to a common vanishing point. I looked in the windows and open vestibules. I saw a tanned woman in a gold thong lying on her stomach on a plastic chaise lounge, the folding kind you take to the beach; it was August, and she was gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. Beside her on the concrete was a can of Pepsi in a Styrofoam cooler, and next to that were the shining steel wheels of the train. I walked by in my brick-dust sneakers. She didn’t budge. I passed a small cast-iron barbecue grill and ducked under a makeshift clothesline with
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