A Few Fall Touches & A Story

So on this rainy, gloomy afternoon I curled up with my laptop and watched a movie.  Not just any old movie either, a good old Paige movie.  Let me define it for ya’ll:

 A Paige Movie:  Noun: a movie that Paige likes but Big Daddy would not be caught dead watching .

I am dead serious ya’ll.  

I watched  The Greatest Showman.

It’s a musical, which I could soooooo live without…..unless you classify Footloose as a musical because that movie is one of my favorites.  I really enjoyed Showman though.  The thing is it really brought back a lot of memories from when I was little, little and my Mama and/or my Aunt Wanda took me to the circus…….. and the incidents ( or seven ) that followed .  Honest to God?????  I don’t know why in Hell they ever took me anywhere before I was like 16 years old.  I LOVE,  like CRAZY TRAIN love animals.  And they knew that.  And, AND they thought, every single time that it would be fun to take the little girl to the BIG circus……….

So here we go.

One of my very earliest memories was being I think in Greenville or Spartanburg, South Carolina out back of the circus, near the animal pens with my Mama and maybe one of my aunts.  I was maybe 5 year old and I saw a child sized man who looked much older poking the very full sized elephants with a crowbar.  The elephants were enclosed in a cattle gate.  I shot through that cattle gate like I was shot out of a gun and put my tiny index finger in that tiny Hungarian man’s face before my Mama even knew I was gone……. Huge elephants all over  me.

Ask my Aunt Wanda…….

They drug me out of there bawling, I am positive.  Later my Mama explained to me that elephant skin is very think and that little Hungarian man could not possibly hurt them.

I had my doubts…….

The next incident was probably 5 or six years later.

 My Aunt Wanda took me to the circus at the Asheville Civic Center.  She must have forgotten the earlier incident because she went way, WAY  out of her way to get seats for us along the tunnel where they bring the animals in for the show.  Back then they would have the animals in the next act all bunched up in a tunnel and waiting to go on.  I vividly remember  turning to my right and being within two feet of an elephant eye an a flappy elephant ear.  I had been taught good manners my entire like so I offered that elephant some of the peanuts that I was eating.  It was one of the highlights of my entire life ya’ll !  I would nudge the elephant’s head and it would extend it’s trunk and take the peanuts from my hand and I was mesmerized ya’ll……..until I ran out of peanuts.  Next it wrapped it’s trunk around my Aunt Wanda’s ankle.   She screamed her guts out……. and it was game over 🙁

Several years later there was the next  Animal Incident  at Myrtle Beach, SC.  We were on the boardwalk and there was an organ grinder with a monkey.  You would offer the monkey money and it would take the money and then hold your hand for a few seconds.  I wanted to hold that monkey’s hand for a while ……… and I got monkey bit.

Many, many years later on that same boardwalk Big Daddy and I were walking along the sea wall and I looked ahead of us and see what turned out to be a baby lion cub running right at me…… and right bye me.  Turns out it escaped from a photo booth and I never could get close enough to grab it damn it!

The moral to this story is I have weird exotic animal karma ya’ll and one day I am actually gonna catch something……… and bring it home with me!

I am crappin’ ya’ll negative .

Paige