Free Touch of the Clown by Glen Huser Page A

won’t drown. You’ll be just like an inner tube bouncing around on the water.”
    When I let my breath out, the buzzing in my ears has settled down into a soft, fuzzy sound.
    â€œThere is a clown inside all of us,” Cosmo is saying. I feel he has been watching me for the last couple of minutes.
    â€œIt is the spirit that we have inside us when we’re children. The love of play, the wonder of discovery.”
    It seems odd to see Cosmo away from his green kitchen, a teacher instead of a lemonade-maker, instead of the person on the swing set singing
Bingo is my ball-o.
    â€œPart of the purpose of this workshop is to develop ways to keep this childlike sense of joyclose by,” Cosmo is saying, “as a kind of lifesaver. Picture yourself threshing away with problems and pressures. You have a twenty-page social studies paper to turn in tomorrow and it’s already ten o’clock at night. Your boyfriend tells you he needs more freedom and maybe you should quit going steady. Your dad has decided you should work in the hardware store for a year instead of enrolling in fine arts at college. You grab hold of your clown life-preserver and it helps you float through.”
    He passes around a bag of clown noses for us to put on. We are to introduce ourselves by giving our name and telling about a time when we were younger and everything felt good. The best time in our life.
    â€œClose your eyes,” Cosmo says, “and I’ll start.”
    I close my eyes. The plastic nose pinches and makes me want to sneeze. Someone coughs and somebody else giggles. I have an urge to giggle myself, but now it is totally quiet.
    â€œMy name is Cosmo the Clown. This is a name I have chosen for myself.” Cosmo begins. “My parents hadn’t figured out who I really was when I was born so I went through the first partof my life with the name Garson Farber. You can see it really did need to be changed.” There is a little sputtering of chuckles around the circle. “The time I am thinking of is when I was about ten years old. I spent a month with my Aunt Charity in an old farmhouse in the Okanagan.”
    Cosmo’s voice is very soft. We have to listen hard to hear everything he is saying.
    â€œIt was August and we ran through orchards and gathered apples.” He stops and it is as if he somehow has those apples in front of him, in his hands. “Some of them we made into thick, juicy pies, some into apple cider, some into funny old people with wrinkly apple faces.”
    He laughs softly, holding the sound in the back of his throat. “Apple people. Then we dragged a puppet theater out of the attic and made about twenty puppet characters out of worn-out socks, and made up plays. We dressed ourselves each day out of a costume box and rolled on the floor laughing as we looked at each other in different hats.”
    The boy with the stutter has moved up close to me. An overhead light catches a shiny part of his earring.
    â€œEach night, Aunt Charity read to me out ofher favorite books, and I would go to sleep in a warm upstairs room that smelled of cedar wood and mothballs, to the sound of my aunt’s voice.”
    Cosmo’s own voice has almost faded away into the still air. “Who’d like to go next?”
    The earring on the boy has quit winking at me. When I steal a look, I see he has sprawled down, totally, on the floor. And he’s looking up at me.
    The girl with the lumberjack shirt raises her hand. “My name is Jessica-Marie Daniels and my most perfect time was when I was about eight years old and my dad was still with us.” The words come in a rush and Jessica-Marie stops and catches her breath. “He was a little bit crazy but he liked playing with us kids and, for a Christmas holiday, we had a cabin at a ski lodge. It was too cold to ski and we stayed inside by the fire and played a game he invented called Magic Lines where one person would draw