Assigned Blog Post #4 - Isaac Buchthal Story

As a baby, Isaac remembered lying in his crib and staring adoringly at the little purple elephant, and red lion, and the orange monkey dangling above him. Even at that young age, he’d felt an intrinsic affinity for these animals—they understood him when no one did; they knew when he was hungry, when he had wet himself, and when he was sleepy; they were there when no one was. And at night, when he was terribly afraid that the Dark had eaten him, he’d open his eyes and from the streaks of light that had crawled into his room from the street outside, he could just make out their shiny painted faces, looking at him with assuring red smiles.

Fast forward a few years and Isaac was in school; he’d been called to the principal’s office countless times because he had turned in a series of “incomplete tests”—he had thought that the elephant standing upright on its hind legs would have made up for the fact that he really didn’t know the answer to problem #24; that the monkey wearing a little vest and a top hat would have made up for the blank on problem #5. The only time he’d paid attention in class was when a substitute showed a video about the circus—everyone, even the substitute, had fallen asleep fifteen minutes into the film—everyone but him. He’d perked up his ears, eyes wide open—he knew that was where he wanted to be. Working at a zoo, his original ambition, was nothing compared to training animals to do tricks!

The next day, he showed up at school with shorts, pulled up almost to his chest by two stringy suspender straps, and his grandfather’s shoes (he had to wear 10 layers of socks for those to fit, but that didn’t matter)—looking like the clown he had seen in the video. Never had he felt so confident. Then and there, he decided that he would never wear anything other than that. An extra bonus, he thought, was that when the circus came to town, he didn’t need to waste any time to dress up—he could just march straight up to the director and tell him that this is where he’d like to work.

And one fateful day, Valentino’s Freak Show came to his town. Isaac was so excited he could barely clip on his suspender straps in the morning! At 4am, he set out towards the fairground where the circus had been set up. It was still dark outside, and his bare knees were covered with goosebumps. But numb with anticipation, he could hardly tell.

His heart pounded as he marched up to the largest tent on the grounds—he assumed this would be the director’s. He cleared his throat and said loudly,

“Excuse me, my name is Isaac Buchthal would like to join your circus."

A scuttling sound came from inside the tent followed by an unzipping of the door flap—by a monkey! The monkey cocked his head to the left, surveyed Isaac, nodded to himself, then held the door flap open with his tiny hairy little hand propped up in the air. Almost instantaneously, Isaac heard a scream.

“Uh-oh,” said the monkey, with a shrug of his little shoulders, “Peaches fainted.”

Peaches?!  Isaac thought he was going insane. Being six feet tall, he couldn’t see inside the tent—you see, the monkey was quite tiny, and he could only hold the flap up so high. Isaac hesitantly bent down and lifted up the flap so he could see inside. And what a sight! “Peaches” was a girl. A girl that could fold herself at the waist, that is. She had apparently been practicing a move in which she lifted her legs up onto her back, so that her head was between her two legs—and upon seeing Isaac—his bare knees in fact—she had fainted. She had a fear of bare knees.