May God Hold You

And other blessings from the traveling circus

If you’re very lucky, you will experience a series of circumstances in your life that will mean you end up in a high school gymnasium on a Wednesday night in March while a storm rages outside, cheering for a bare-chested man in glittery spandex leggings who threads a bow and arrow between his toes, stands on his hands on two protrusions welded into a steel table, bends his spine in half, draws the bow and fires an arrow into the heart of a white balloon on a pillowed plinth. POP!

If you are very lucky you will live in a town small enough and sleepy enough that the prospect of a traveling circus troupe will fill the gym with your friends and friends of friends and your kids and their friends and their siblings and their siblings’ friends, an intricate and radiating web in which no one of you is separated from the other by more than two degrees of friendship.

This is my fourth year attending Billy Martin’s Cole All-Star Circus. It’s a show stuck in time, an evening of low production value and stock-standard circus tricks: a juggler, a unicyclist, a woman who disappears into a fabric tunnel and emerges in a new outfit not one or five or ten times but twenty times. It is silly and strange and exceedingly easy to poke fun at: the over-the-top costumes and the stage makeup, the worn set and fraying props.

We are, after all, living in a world of Cirque du Soleil documentaries and Red Bull X-Games and a nearly constant stream of seemingly everyday people doing extraordinary things that defy body mechanics and gravity and technology. We accept, up front, that nothing is impossible. That someone somewhere in Dubai will figure out how to hang glide off the top of the Burj Khalifa. That we can skim along a city block alongside a beautiful rollerblader who dodges obstacles in perfect sync with the latest pop hit.

At the small-town traveling circus, you get what is just barely impossible. Furthermore, there is virtually no separation between the audience and the performers. They are there, in all of their humanness, putting on a show of less than epic proportions to a gymnasium that is more than halfway full of adults who have most likely recently seen someone ride a 100-foot wave off the coast of Portugal, up close, through the crystal-clear eye of a drone. There is a definite air of skeptical bemusement. But the kids? They sit in a vibrating knot in the middle of the polished floor, chattering and wiggling. The atmosphere in the gym is thick with this combo—a low-pressure system and a high-pressure system, adulthood and childhood, tangled up together.

By the end of the first act—a man with clown paint on his face is balancing on a 20-foot-tall unicycle—it has changed. Everyone is excited now. The audience is, once more, able to be awed by only slightly extraordinary. A man in a handstand, a woman who can juggle five iridescent bowling pins at once, a couple who hang from aerial silks, twisted into an ecstatic embrace. The crowd is laughing, kids shrieking in delight as our neighbor and friend Garth Brown is pulled from the audience, blindfolded, and made to hold a balloon in his mouth while a performer snaps a whip nearby. The music is too loud, the lights are flashing too rapidly, and the performers have been on the road too long, for too many years, and yet it still works. We find that the awe—the kind that asks for so little—is still within us.

The show is over too soon. Billy Martin, who just last year strutted around the stage, magnificent in his satin suit and platinum hair, is ringmaster in voice only now. He calls out the performers from his seat in the shadows, one by one, and they pause in their hurried packing up and step into the lights. The crowd cheers. The show is over, but Billy is still talking in his tent revivalist voice, his racetrack announcer baritone, a voice that pins you in place, no matter how far you’ve overshot bedtime on a school night.

“Thank you for coming,” he says. The Dua Lipa song blasting in the background reaches a triumphant crescendo. “And may God bless you and hold you in the palm of his hand.”

If you, like me, are sentimental enough, if you are constantly searching for signs that this world—your world—is a good place to be, this will make you cry. You will become aware of the two energies again. The kids, excited, buzzing, ready to go. The adults, hushed, suddenly conscious of the frailty of this moment. Our kids will never be this age again. Nor will we. The second we step out of this gymnasium, this moment will be gone, and we will be hurtled back into the slipstream of parenthood. And Billy—will we ever see him again? And, if not, will we ever see the traveling circus again? “And one more thing,” he says, calling me back from the brink. “Treat each other with kindness. Thank you, and Good night.”

The circus lights fade out, and for a split second, it is perfectly dark and quiet.

The gymnasium lights snap on. My five-year-old tugs on my hand. I follow him into the wild, windy night.