Story Focus: "The Big Top"

I used to tell a lie. It wasn't a particularly harmful lie. It wasn't to cover up another lie, or something that I thought would hurt someone or implicate me in some crime or misadventure. It was simply a lie about why I am afraid of clowns. It went like this:

When I was 5 or 6, my mom took my brother and me to the circus, despite my insistence on not going. The circus was a dirty and sad place to me, and I wanted nothing of it. Naturally, a clown, seeing a stubborn and cranky kid, thought he would try to creep a smile on my face. He jumped up to me, his movements comically exaggerated. He crouched low, getting in my face, asking stupid clown questions like, "Why so glum, chum?" in a voice like Disney's Goofy. Without thinking, I cocked my arm and loaded it right into the clown's big, bright nose, which let out a screeching honk-honk as the clown toppled to his ass, his scowl made terrifyingly preposterous with his clown makeup.

It's not even that great of a story. I can usually make it work when hammed up on beer and silly, but seeing it on paper reveals its lack luster. I don't even know why I started telling that story. I'm not even afraid of clowns.

I don't trust people who say they're afraid of clowns. Clowns are one of those things I feel 90% of people say they're afraid of, but maybe only 20% of people really are, if that. Unnerved seems a better, more honest term for the feeling I get from clowns, but it's funnier to be afraid of them, to exaggerate the feeling to fear, the irony being that a clown is the very epitome of an exaggeration for comic affect. So to say you're afraid of clowns when what you really mean is unnerved is to act a clown yourself.

The other irony that exists is that there really aren't any clowns in Rohan's story, "The Big Top," which unfortunately doesn't appear online for me to link you to, so I'll just excerpt the intro here:

I spotted the poster in the supermarket window, a large glossy sheet with a bright splash of words and colorful snapshots of the clowns, trapeze artists, and the Big Top. That evening over dinner, I suggested to my husband we'd go.

He sprinkled too much parmesan over his spaghetti. "What would bring us to the circus?"

"What wouldn't?"

He let the obvious hang in the silence.

We'd never managed to have children.

They appear on a poster in the first sentence, but not after that. Reading is funny, man. There is so much loaded into this story, so much that is not about the lies we invent for ourselves to tell between pints and shots, but my mind latched on to this idea as soon as I read the first sentence, it steel-gripped the theme and wouldn't let me read the story in any other way. In 5 years, I'll read this story again and respond to it in a completely different way. Perhaps Britt and I will have decided, however unlikely, that we want kids. Perhaps we'll have been having a hard time of it, something or other in one of us not functioning properly despite all the wanting.

This is how I respond to reading. I rarely read with what one might call a "critical eye," at least beyond whether I enjoy what I'm reading. I don't get much satisfaction looking at a piece of writing and asking, "What does it mean?" as though it were some riddle to be unlocked. I was happy to leave that behind when I graduated from Ball State.

Asking "What does it mean?" is a much different question than "What does it mean to me?" If I was still at BSU responding to this story for my comp class, I would write about the longing of wanting a child and not having one. I would write about the themes apparent, what the color blue means searching for why Ethel chose that color for the monkey, possibly about the crisp sparse language.

But that's not what it means to me. To me, it means lying, it means finding a void to explain a feeling in my life and creating a simple silly fiction to explain it. It means telling that fiction over and over throughout my life until it becomes a part of my story. It means my friends who might have heard this story reading this blog post and what their reactions might be.

What does this story mean to you? How do you respond to reading--more analytically or more personally responsive? Have I told you this story as though it were true? Are you afraid of clowns?