Dear Crabby, If You Were in a Circus, Which Character Would You Be?

Dear Crabby, If You Were in a Circus, Which Character Would You Be?

Sincerely, Candy Cotton

Dear Candy,

Well, Ringmaster of course. I’d have to be the one calling all the shots. For years and years, I’ve put my children, their friends, and my grand kids in corners … certainly I could put circus acts in rings. I would grow a big, bushy mustache, don a tall top hat, and call to attention … “And now, in this ring, feast your eyes on another stupid human trick …”

That’s what I would do today. However, years ago when I was just a boy, my father put on his own kind of Crabby Circus for the extended family. And I portrayed many of the popular circus acts you’ve seen over the years. You would think, with my sense of humor that I’d be a clown – nope, dad had other plans for me.

Once I was a trapeze artist. My father rigged a swing-like device from a large oak tree branch and I had to swing back and forth, back and forth, building up my momentum and then I’d let go – flying through the air – while my brother would swing a second swing from another branch in my direction. Never, not once, did he get the timing right. No net, just an old mattress on the ground that broke my fall 50 percent of the time.

The next year they made me a tightrope walker. I almost made it across once, but a squirrel jumped out of the tree, ran down the rope at me, around my feet, and disappeared in the other tree. All this commotion caused me to loose my balance with each of my feet slipping of the rope – one on each side of the rope – it’s a wonder I could produce any children after that incident.

This went on for several years with different acts each time. I tried my hand at knife throwing (thrown at me), fire breathing (my taste buds are still not the same), human cannonball (remember the mattress), and many others. But the one that I really recall is lion taming.

Dad had captured a feral cat that had been roaming the neighborhood and built a ten-by-ten foot fenced-in area. The fence was six-feet tall. He locked me in with a small chair and plastic whip. Little did I know what was coming when he released the feral cat into the “ring.” I wondered why the chair and whip smelled like tuna fish – dad had sprayed them down with the water left over from the tuna cans from the night before (which also answered the question why we had such a giant tuna fish dinner last night). Anyway, the cat-lion was chasing me around the ring – hissing and clawing at me, the whip, and the chair – over and over, and all I could hear were its roaring hisses and my family laughing and laughing. The cat finally figured out there wasn’t any real food to be had and ran up the fence, jumped over, landed on my dad’s head. It clawed the heck out of him before it ran out of the yard, down the street, never to be seen again.

Poetic justice and the last year we held the Crabby Circus.

Sincerely, Dear Crabby