The circus comes to town

13 June 2008

Me.
I am the circus.

Ty-ty, Chubby, Sadie and I, rolling into Eleanor Park, were spectacle enough to put Barman and Bailey to shame. As a general rule, these children are a spectacle—no, that's unfair: Sadie is always a spectacle; she likes to cut her own hair, wear her pajamas all day, and live every moment at full, four-year-old volume.

The boys, on the other hand, are as quiet as their sister is loud and are prone to morosity. Chubby can’t talk yet and Ty-ty, when he hasn’t locked himself in the computer room, only mumbles where he finds it absolutely necessary.

Like when we visited the bats at the children’s zoo:

“Dija know there’s a bat with six-foot wingspan?”

“What was that Ty-ty?”

“Dija know there’re bats with a six-foot wingspan?”

He's right; it’s called the flying fox bat. Except this zoo just has Egyptian fruit bats.

But they moved last week, the kids I mean, away from the zoo and the museum and the library. So their mom suggested we bike to the park.

Bike? I imagined myself like some mad dog-walker: griping leashes to 15 bicycles, being dragged along by these little energizer bunnies. Funny, in my imagination little carbon-copy Sadies were pedaling all 15 bicycles.

“You can take my bike, it has the baby seat on the back and the Burly’s all hooked up. Ty-ty just likes to wear skates and hang onto the back. I’ll only be gone an hour or so, so just bring them home when they get tired.”

The Burley, I found, is a brightly colored bike trailer—so the bike is transformed into a sort of circus caravan. Oh also, Mom is much taller than I, so I pedaled on tippy-toes. Where is a tutu when you really need one? We only wanted for clown paint. Or streamers or something—a dancing poodle. No matter, the other park goers stared at us all the same; me and my ragamuffins were loud and wild and so full of joy to be out in the sunshine with the grass and trees.

Pedaling tip-toe back down Channing after a rambunctious afternoon of monkey bars and pushing swings, I thought to myself I must remember this when I am Mom. What a good adventure for a lazy afternoon.