Circus: Training Destruction

The only circus competitor whom I could not catch in sheer flexibility and bravery, given infinite time and patience, wandered into trapeze training today. I can say with confidence that she is the only person I have come across in that gym who has not made me feel furiously envious and confused. Why? What special something does this one have that is different from all the others? For starters, she’s about three years old and that’s just too young for envy, even for me. Actually, that’s starters and enders.

Let’s call her Marguerite because I like that name and don’t know hers. Marguerite is the offspring of a hip, French trapeze dad (a lot of them are, apparently) and an absent mother. I am attributing hipness to the former solely on the basis of his connection with the circus. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help myself. He did compromise his hipness somewhat by wandering the perimeter of the gym displaying feats of strength at various stopping points. I assume these were for the benefit of those present, including Marguerite, because they were not sustained enough to have any training value. The male must, as the Nature Channel tells us, prove himself through demonstrated competence. Marguerite remained unimpressed with his handstands and pull-ups. Like a bored socialite, she sucked on her sippy cup and observed the room. There was no need for her to demonstrate her ability to put her leg behind her head or her head between her legs. We all knew it. We laughed at her cuteness and hoped she would not find out that this was the best we could do at a split, at a handspring, at pulling our adult and recalcitrant bodies into the positions she could achieve effortlessly. We consoled ourselves that she did not have the coordination to put it all together, either mentally to find us out or physically to string it all together and destroy us all.