Balance

People sometimes ask why I always wear a beard.

It's to hide the scars from my former profession. The scars inside, though, are worse. It was jealousy and sabotage that ended my career, and a lifelong friendship--But I'm putting the cart before the horse here.

It all started when we were kids. Donny and I were best pals, but boy were we competitive. Whatever one of would do the other had to outdo. One day Donny showed me how he could balance his mom's kitchen broom on end in the palm of his hand. The next day I called him over to show him I could do the same with my dad's shop broom; it had a longer handle and a heavier head.

He topped that by shifting the broom from hand to hand.

I balanced it on one finger and shifted it from finger to finger.

He put it on the point of his chin.

By the next summer we had built a rig with a platform to hold a kitchen chair. Donny talked his little sister into setting in the chair; but she fell out, broke her collar bone, and his mom said she couldn't do it anymore. Donny blamed it on me of course. I could always count on Donny to pull a dirty trick when the chips were down.

The way things worked out we each got a job with rival carnivals, and the competition heightened.

Donny had a girl balanced on a 20 foot pole. I went to a 40 foot pole with a manicurist and her customer. Donny countered with three Hungarian contortionists 50 feet up. I put an Italian family 65 feet up with an entire dinner setting with baked lasagna and huge goblets of red wine. We almost had some serious trouble with that one, when little Mario spilled his.

I thought old “Donny the Magnificent” had finally beaten me once and for all when he balanced on his chin a 75 foot pole topped with a horse and rider in full parade dress holding a 10 foot staff flying a brightly spotlighted Old Glory. It was magnificent! I was depressed.

Then in a flash it came to me. I could do this! I built a special rig and hired Millicent and her trainer. Millicent was four tons of the prettiest Indian elephant you ever saw. She was smart too. It didn't take long to teach her to sit in the chair and she got real good at catching peanuts that were thrown to her.

The big night came and the stadium we had hired was filled to capacity. The spotlights played on the elephant as the crane gently set her in the huge chair firmly welded to a platform atop a 100 foot pole. When the crane released Millicent’s harness, another spot came on me. A hush came over the crowd. I grasped the pole firmly, raised it carefully to my chin, and backed slowly away from the supporting stand.

It was beautiful. Millicent sat up there as regal as an Indian princess delicately picking peanuts out of the air that were thrown to her by spangled girls with slingshots. All of the 60,000 people in the stands sat in silent awe as Aldo the strongman threw her an Olympic style torch that she held aloft with pride.

In the silence I heard a tiny squeak. I recognized that sound about the same time Millicent did. I saw her ears twitch and her eyes grew large with fear. "Oh No!" I thought, "She’s afraid of mice."

Almost instantly she was standing up in that chair dancing from foot to foot, waving the torch in front of her to ward off any impending mouse attack. While, a hundred feet below, the bottom end of that pole was making some terrible gouges in my chin.

But you know—I might still have saved the day if the mouse, Donny had sneaked into the stadium, hadn't run up my pant leg.