PURCHASE, N.Y. — What a circus, I thought, surveying a scene of unimaginable frenzy.
Then I hopped into the ringmaster's car and Pam climbed into our RV and we drove off, leaving our children at the mercy of a man we'd known for all of 10 minutes, a man who once earned his living on a teeterboard.
Sometimes a road trip's most enduring memories aren't forged by slipping into a still lake as it drains the gold from the sky, or by the flavors of muffaletta eaten at a noisy New Orleans cafe during a downpour, but by an engine's weird growl on a highway lined with darkened Kmarts and Pep Boys.
Were my wife, Pam, and I to launch a new Hudson Valley school of painting, our canvases would feature an RV jacked up outside a gas station. Our work would be sufficiently vivid that viewers might almost hear the nasal roar of mechanics cursing and laughing down in the pit, and feel the drool of sweat down fabric stuck to flesh by record heat. We'll forever equate suburban New York with garrulous fix-it folks, grumpy Avis clerks and the heat of a strip mall Laundromat because this is where our rental RV's front brakes broke as we continued across the country, exploring family issues.
The kids, though, will have entirely different memories, thanks to George Orosz, a friend of a friend who runs a summer circus camp at the State University of New York. For two days, Pam and I shifted into that high-pitched, just-getting-stuff-done gear that is triply annoying on the road because each mundane minute taunts of another excitement lost. We called the RV rental agency, found a mechanic, tracked down a rental car, then picked up the kids and shuttled them to an uninspiring business travelers' hotel in the evening.
Only the next afternoon, when we return to SUNY with the RV's brakes replaced, do we reawaken to the odd fact that besides being harried citizens of the automotive age, we also happen to be parents. We step back into the gymnasium expecting a reunion with Ashley, 12, Emily, 10, and Robert, 7. Instead, we are greeted by three . . . circus kids!
Actually, more than 50 kids storm around the gymnasium. They ping off the walls on unicycles. They swing overhead on a trapeze. Little girls tiptoe a 2-foot-high tightrope with balancing wings fluttering at their sides. Teenage boys rip polka-dotted hats off each other's heads in a fast-paced clown routine.
*
