Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

When I was a kid we had a car called the Circus wagon. It was a rusty Ford Station wagon that my mom would load up with kids, cats, dogs, parrots and whatever strange creatures managed to make it into that vehicle.
We had a farm of sorts, a horse stable where the outcasts kept their horses. Only the rich and upstanding could keep horses at the hunt club. So we had the local drug addict musician son of a cop, the Mafioso, the lesbian couple, the gay son of a cop, the crazy French Canadian who had his pony in the back seat of his Caddy with the wife and kids, the daughter of a rich socialite who was called Crazy Lady and her truly crazy kids, the whacked out large appliance salesman who was almost but not quite acceptable for the Hunt Club, and others who had less outstanding but equally unacceptable credentials. They came to us. So did the neighborhood kids with no place to hang out, the poor little rich girl who was not able to date the black boys around her mom, the town drunk who had no place else to park his car/home, the cigar chomping looser truck driver who loved my mom and ran errands for her just to be around. And all the rest of the menagerie that exists on the fringes of small town America, or did in the mid to late sixties of the last century.
All and any of these would find a way into the circus wagon and away my mom would drive. After the horses had been fed and watered, after they had been put in their stalls or out to pasture for the night, we would jump into the circus wagon and take off for parts unknown. Into the hinterlands of Connecticut with the AM radio blaring “Light My Fire” or “Born To Be Wild” we would take off into the firefly lit summer night headed for the places that only a circus wagon could go. Into the night sky we would ride, Like Icabob Crane running from his headless horseman, like the riders in the sky running from that cattle stampede in our fiery imaginations. Anything could happen, and for us, a trip in that rusted car, was a trip to another planet. Or so it seemed with my mom at the helm and half a dozen kids and 3 or 4 dogs, cats and birds in tow. In that world we were kings and queens of the road and there was nothing we could not do, no place we could not go, as long as it was to Danny’s Tac Shop or Uncle Franks Pond, or the Beach or the Duchess Drive Inn, anyplace else we were liable to have the cops called on us. But in the vast world of our imaginations, we were free to travel. and travel we did.
It was a wild and wonderful world and as the bookworm of the bunch, I silently watched and wondered what it was we were doing, and where we were going. We were not your typical suburban family, We had a run down farm house with bad plumbing and a well that ran dry. The cops came every summer to tell us the horses were running loose down Main Street and we better get the halters and grain buckets out and we would at 3 Am. I had a dad who lived in California somewhere and my mom tried hard to make us feel like we were special, so special that we never noticed that we lived from hand to mouth and my mom shoplifted to get those extras we needed from time to time and the town drunk took me on midnight raids of the other farmers to “borrow” bails of hay for the horses next weeks meals. I was descended from the Pharaohs and my mom was an Indian Princess. The elementary school would always bug me around the end of the school year to get my mom to perform stunts on horse back for the school fair and the rest of the year they complained about the smell from the animals. But when we were in that car, rushing around in the night air, we were like barbarians raiding the Roman Empire, and who knew what treasures we would bring back from our raiding.
It is late, I must stop. Another time for another tale from my childhood. This is just an introduction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 12:25 am and is filed under Art & entertainment, Gnosis:, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.