|
|
“He was originally one of the three wise men, you know,” Jay whispered one day after the Mad Juggler had left on his rusty bicycle. “But before that he was a wizard on Atlantis before it sank. And when he was supposed to bring Jesus a gift he gave him myrrh but kept the magic juggling pins to himself. Then he was cursed to walk around forever clubbing people with the pins until he said he wouldn’t do it anymore, and that’s when he started juggling for kids like us. I heard that there’s a secret club still searching the ocean for the juggling pins ‘cuz they think they sunk with Atlantis.” Jay was always much more concerned with the pins than I was, but I liked the idea of Aric rebelling against some power that made him hurt people. But the parents never tried to stop their kids from crowding around for his juggling. In recent years we parents have discussed him from time to time, especially when new families move into the neighborhood. Most people just sigh as if bored when he comes up in conversation. “I’m just tired of hearing all the speculations about him,” my neighbor said to me just two weeks before we learned of his death. “There’s never anything new anyway.” She was right. We never learned anything about where he had come from or even where exactly he lived. No one really felt like wasting energy to try to follow him home or inquire about his life. I didn’t think this two weeks ago, but after what happened today I realize how little we knew about him. We had no will, no desire to know anything beyond our streets. Such knowledge would only come from an effort we were unwilling to expend. We were comfortable not knowing anything about Aric, the Mad Juggler. Even I, after several years of learning from him how to juggle, had not learned any of the secrets of his life, even though my curiosity was then still a part of me. I refused to practice on my own since it would have been without the three yellow balls, and I never dared ask to borrow them, though today I’m not sure why. But I continued practicing with him regularly for about three years. As an eleven-year-old, however, I began to feel silly juggling even though I had gotten quite good. To tell the truth, although I never learned to juggle pins or four balls like Aric could, if barely, I was better than he was with just three balls. For the next year I begged to practice less and less. My friends didn’t juggle, so I started thinking that I shouldn’t either. Some of the boys, I think, went through a similar problem with piano lessons. They didn’t dislike playing piano, but they hated explaining to their friends why they couldn’t always play soccer after supper or why they always had to go to Mrs. Attins’s house on Saturday morning. It was worse for me: I couldn’t practice inside. If I ever wanted to practice, all the other kids would see me and watch while I threw the same three yellow balls over and over. By the time another year had passed I stopped even going out to watch the Mad Juggler perform. Only the little kids gathered there anyway, and there was no way anyone was going to think I was only ten years old. I didn’t ever forget him. I would still hear his off-key whistling and his noisy old bike. He just became a part of the past. The funeral of the Mad Juggler was a time to revisit the past. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew most of us from the neighborhood would be there, especially those of us with children who had been entertained by Aric. I was surprised at how many of those I had grown up with still lived in the same neighborhood. I had forgotten who many of my neighbors were. When I first arrived at the cemetery, I saw them just as the same old tired people I saw every day driving by our house or mowing their lawns. As I started thinking back to the years I had known the Mad Juggler, though, my neighbors began to change. I suddenly realized that Mr. Marner, who owned the house just two down from my own, had once been a tall boy with a red ball whom I had tried to hide behind. And as I noticed Mr. Simon looking intently at the table piled with all Aric’s juggling supplies, I realized that he had once been a runny-nosed kid named Jay. Right in the middle of the table were three battered table legs with three stripes of blue, red and yellow electrical tape. The bittersweet nostalgia seemed fitting at the funeral of a man who had lived so long, but still I felt that something was lacking. Our Mad Juggler surely must have had juggling friends. He had nowhere near the skill needed to be a professional juggler, I knew, but he must have known some jugglers at least good enough to perform at the funeral. Without that it just wasn’t right. I kept looking over my shoulder thinking I would see someone walk up juggling three golden suns or some magical pins. No such person appeared. When I got home, a small box sat on our doorsill. I knew what would be inside even before I picked it up. I had not even thought to look for the three golden balls on the table in the cemetery, but I knew now that they hadn’t been there. I opened the box and saw the balls, as bright as my memory could paint them. Somehow I evaded the questions of my husband and daughter about what they were, then hid them upstairs. Now I hesitate to touch them. They still burn with the energy of three suns as they sit beside this notebook, still in their unmarked box. I don’t know I can handle the energy of all three at once anymore. I feel so tired. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll take them out and try to juggle a bit for my daughter. Perhaps.
*****
END *****
|