Flying

We were in the beginning of the second millennium. After predicted world wide computer disasters didn't happen, the feared terrorist attack did happen. I heard about it on the news as I was driving toward my son's school to volunteer in his kindergarten class. When I got there all the adults, including my son's teacher, were in the hallway whispering. At the end of 2001, I went with my husband and son to the family friendly New Years Eve event known as First Night.
This is when everyone bundles up for December in Vermont and walks around to events set up for families with small children in the afternoon and to evening events set up for bigger people who prefer a variety of entertainers to New Year's Eve drinking. My husband, six-year-old son and I went to the afternoon events. At the end you can go to 7:00 p.m. fireworks instead of 12:00 mid night fireworks.

After stopping at the hot cocoa tent, we walked to the large elementary school gym to see a juggler and an acrobat. Most of the folding chairs were taken. We stood in the back for awhile before finding two middle aisle seats for the three of us. Cozily, I sat next to my husband with our son on my lap. The aisle seat gave us a good view of the stage.

The juggler seemed like a warm up act for the edgier acrobat who balanced a chair, holding a small girl, on his nose. The first Mom he approached said no to her child being put in a precarious position. Somehow, the second Mom said OK.

Continuing to pick people from the audience, the acrobat then chose a young man for tossing bowling pins. His timing may have been to give the audience a break after the somewhat frightening chair act. The acrobat, who I found out later was an eighth grade science teacher by day, then walked down the middle aisle where I was sitting with my son on my lap. DON'T PICK ME loomed large in my otherwise blank mind until he stopped right in front of me. My son was tossed onto my husband as I was hastily pulled down the aisle towards the stage. Weakly, I hoped for the equivalent of bowling pin tossing. Instead, my forty-four year old 125 pound body was muscled on top of the acrobat's shoulders. He asked me if I had ever taken gymnastics while growing up. I hadn't. Undeterred, he climbed on top of a unicycle and rode with me on his shoulders through the large school gym filled with people. When he asked me to be an airplane and flap my wings while making raspberry sounds, I did it as I looked in horror at the many lucky passive audience faces including the young woman from our synagogue and her family. Later, when she ran into me in the grocery store, she approached me like a semi-celebrity. More people were amused when I sent out an email. Someone even forwarded the email to someone who worked at the same school as the acrobat/eighth grade science teacher. I never heard back.

The best part was June 2002, right before the school summer vacation, when I was going through the shopping bag of papers sent home by my son's kindergarten teacher. I found a page in his school journal with a drawing of a big Mommy standing on the shoulders of a small man on a small unicycle. Many circles and lines show the audience. Underneath the picture was written:

1/2/03 [I was a little off on dates]

Me my mom and my dad went to Edmen's sckooll to wach the jugular and the surckis man wen he pickt my mom wen she went up on the unicycle