Plates on a stick: a short story

This story begins somewhere outside of Paris in the summer of 1918 along the banks of the river Mame.  The story is less than half true.

During this, the last major German offensive on the Western Front during the First World World, more than 139 000 allied troops lost their lives or were wounded in not even three weeks.  Among them, a young man named Alfred.  Alfred, like so many others, wasn’t born a soldier.   He was a poet – a sentimentalist – in love with life and all that it had to offer.   But that was then, before the world collapsed.

Sitting in those stinking, rotten trenches of human despair, Alfred Joyce Kilmer (for let us use his full name) was undoubtedly less sentimental.  All light now extinguished.  All hope now gone.  And yet his words and his story remain, as I recently discovered through happenstance and with a little help from Google.     

Alfred, just two years before his death, I discover, was fascinated by what he called “The magic of the circus”. 

We who every morning at the breakfast table read of war and desolation need to cheer our hearts with the burlesque battles of the clowns; we who ride in the subway need to exult when the charioteer, with streaming toga, guides his six white horses on their thunderous course; we whose eyes are daily on our ledgers and sales records need to lift them, if not to the stars, at least to the perilous wire on which a graceful pedestrian gayly flirts with death. (The Circus and Other Essays)

I wonder whether Alfred thought of clowns and therein found comfort on the day he died?  Did he still believe this theatre of childhood dreams was the “greatest poem in the world”?

Fast forward to 1971.  There’s Bradley standing a short distance away from the expectant crowd, just next to the row of caravans that had been the closest thing to home that Bradley (and the rest of the Troup for that matter) could recall.  In the wake of the Second ‘Great’ War, jobs were hard to find and any sense of purpose even harder. 

People love the circus, his father used to say.  It gives them something to believe in.  Faith arising from something as simple as a poster telling them that “there are in the slide-show a man with three legs, a woman nine feet tall, and a sword swallower.” That’s all it takes.

Bradley didn’t have three legs and wasn’t particularly tall.  But he could make a plate turn upon a stick.  He was a clown, you see - the clown that once had cheered his poor father’s heart, right up until the day he died on that unfortunate summer’s day.

Now in his sixties, any sense of cheer was long gone.  Children and their parents came and marveled, came and laughed, came and sat in awe of those who painted themselves to hide the sadness of who they had become.

Fast forward to 1996.  Bradley doesn’t spin plates any more.  In fact, he doesn’t do much at all except watch the television in the corner of the room that seems to be the only form of permanent entertainment the nurses want to offer.  On this particular day, though, the old man lifts his head in time to catch a glimpse; recognizing immediately that familiar lassoo and flicking of the wrist that is sufficient to produce the magical gyroscopic effect.  David Spathaky, assisted by Debbie Woolley, it is reported, has managed to spin one hundred and eight plates simultaneously on live television .  A new Guinness World Record is set. 

Fast forward to 2009.  Sue never knew her dad, just rumours about him.  And the rumours weren’t sufficient to arouse much curiosity beyond that point.  In any case, there was too much to do these days to get all sentimental about things.  There was nothing sentimental about her life, she thought.  Three children, a long forgotten man in her life, a job she didn’t care for and a boss who didn’t much care for her.  It’s like spinning plates, she’d say.  I just can’t do it anymore.  Sooner or later they are all going to come crashing down at my feet.

And on the banks of a river, just outside of Paris, the memory of a voice rang out from the darkness.

You are exactly right.  They might just do.

But by daring to do what you do – nurturing those now adolescent children in the way that you do – you have now become the greatest poem in the world.

Your grandfather would be proud.