One thing the Ringling clown alley never taught me about was love. But then, clown alley is the natural and logical opponent to everything that is fine and noble -- it takes every great sentiment known to man and turns it topsy turvy for a belly laugh. Underneath that belly laugh, it might be said, the audience is acknowledging that fine things like love and patriotism and piety can be corrupted and used for foul and hurtful purposes. And so a good laugh at the expense of romance or politics is a healthy cynicism that all free and wise people should exercise constantly. And thus the buffoon in his particolored uniform with a slapstick at his shoulder, ready to do battle against the inconsistencies of the human heart.
When I met Amy for the first time in Williston I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to embrace the complete beauty of a fulfilling physical, emotional, and spiritual relationship. Heaven knows my own parents never had such a thing when I was growing up -- they had simply grown used to each other over the years and found it easier to fight than to disengage. In clown alley all finer emotions were carefully camouflaged, if they existed at all, with a cunning patina of crude humor. Only at church did I find any celebration of love and marriage. And time was passing. All my companions from my LDS mission in Thailand were by now married -- the wedding announcements had trickled in over the past two years, showing bride and groom silhouetted against the Salt Lake Temple. I was the last holdout.
So it’s possible I was simply brainwashing myself when I looked at Amy and immediately told myself that I was going to marry her. But what does it matter how or why I loved her? Love is the only mystery we never finish exploring. And enjoying. And hating.
She is the oldest daughter of Alice and Fred Anderson. The family is a huge one. There were twelve children, with Amy being the oldest daughter. They all lived, at that time, in a former funeral home in Tioga, North Dakota. It was the only building big enough to hold them all. And they certainly needed holding. The Anderson kids ranged in age from two to twenty-nine. They were notorious for showing up, en masse, at church picnics and Sons of Norway dinners like a swarm of locusts -- eradicating anything edible in their path. They liked being mobile, and like so many other rural kids back then they had a collection of derelict jalopies they were constantly resuscitating to take them up and down the washboard gravel roads of Williams County. Amy was the first one in the family to get a college education, and her parents doted on her.
They did not like it when I started seeing her. I was not a local. I was tainted with a circus background. And I wrote her a poem every day. I began writing to her every day after our second date, and continued to do so for the next fifteen years. The Post Office owes me a medal, considering the fortune I spent on stamps when I was away from her traveling with the circus after we married.
Amy was not impressed with my cooking, when I had her over for dinner. She thought my bacon/potato casserole rather greasy and fattening. She knew I couldn’t afford to take her out to the movies or to a restaurant very often. I was being paid 700 dollars a month. So she usually came over to my place with her lesson plans for the next day to get my input on them. She’d bring a green salad and some of her mother’s whole wheat buns and chokecherry preserves for our dinner and we’d work late into the night trying to figure out how to interest her Special Ed pupils in learning to tie their shoelaces or opening and warming up a can of soup.
Inevitably she asked me to come to her school in Tioga to do a clown show. At that point I had sworn off clowning forever. The memories of the laughter and the thrill of the crowd were too painful to revive again. And the debacle with Becky Thingvold over my clown academy still rankled.. So initially I hemmed and hawed and stalled Amy until she played her ace in the hole:
“But Timmy, I thought you liked me . . . “
I did like her. Dammit, I loved her! So I agreed to pull out the old gladrags one last time.
She had me do the show in her classroom, which was narrow and smelled strongly of Pine Sol. Her Special Ed kids, all in their late teens, paid no attention to me whatsoever, and when my back was turned for a moment they snatched up my makeup kit to smear themselves with warpaint. They muddied up all my colors, ruining a complete tin of Stein’s clown white.
But when it was all over I warmly thanked Amy for the chance to use the talents God had given me for the benefit of others. Just as I had cynically suspected, this moved her to the point of embracing me and landing a long lingering kiss on my rouged lips. I reciprocated, and by the time we broke our clinch her face looked like she had roseola.
It was now official: Dusty the Clown had a Girlfriend!
(to be continued)
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