JUNE 5, 2019 – One day at Franklin Elementary, where I was a third-grader, the teachers handed out flyers for the Shrine Circus. If you wanted to go, all you had to do was have your parents fill out the form at the bottom of the flyer and pay the dollar to cover the ticket price and the school bus ride down to old civic auditorium in Minneapolis. My friend Steve said he was going and thought I should too. It sounded like fun, so I said, “Sure” and took the flyer home for my mother to fill out.
The next Saturday I got dropped off at the school grounds where the yellow buses had lined up. Soon I found Steve, and together we saw one of the fourth grade teachers, the perpetually stern Miss Gorham, standing outside a bus, directing kids aboard. We’d been assigned to her bus, and it was filling up fast, so we ran to it before she had a chance to shout at us.
My family lived in town, so my sisters and I walked to school every day. The bus was for the country kids, and I was envious of them. They traveled long distances to and from school, which meant they got to see lots of countryside. I loved going for long car rides, because I could do just that—watch constantly changing scenery go by.
Now I’d get to ride the way the country kids did every single school day. I couldn’t decide, really, what was likely to be more fun—the bus ride or the circus. I told Steve I wanted a window seat.
Miss Gorham checked off our names, told us the bus was nearly full and to get on board quickly. “Once you find your seats,” she said severely, “stay seated until we reach our destination.” If she taught kids anything it was that you didn’t mess with authority, especially hers. Steve stepped aboard first. I followed.
Suddenly, it hit me—”it”being a wall of the deafening cacophony of 45 kids yacking and yelling away as I’d never heard them do. I was as horrified as I was mystified that kids just like me could (a) create so much noise; and (b) act as though it were perfectly normal. I was equally perplexed by Miss Gorham’s failure to assert immediately her considerable authority. When I saw her stick cotton in her ears, I realized there were limits to that authority.
The noise worsened when some genius decided to sing “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I covered my ears and closed my eyes, picturing a nightmare in which I was stuck in the liquor store in downtown Anoka. I was surrounded by high walls loaded with beer bottles, as the “genius,” standing precariously on a ladder, pulled them down, one-by-one, and passed them down to a rowdy throng of kids singing off-key.
The main thing I remember about the circus is the dread I had of the one on the bus ride home.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
