I Love This Story

Last year, my husband and his best friend took the kiddos (our daughter, and his best friend’s son) to the circus to buy over-priced treats and see weary elephants standing on stools.

Our daughter was around three years old, maybe a few months older. The event brought back the vaguest memory of me going to the circus with my first dad who died just before I turned four. I thought that it was me, my dad, my dad’s friend, and the friend’s two sons. I didn’t have any actual memories of going, just a notion that I went and that my dad took me.

The week before my husband took our daughter, I thought more and more about that night. I had to have been around the same age as my daughter and I knew that the guy who went with us had sons my age. In later years, I would continue to hang out with these boys because their mom and my mom were best friends. I stopped seeing their father because, like my parents, he and his wife were divorced before I could remember. I only remember the boys and their mother.

The closer we got to the big circus night for my daughter, the more obsessed I became with that memory. It was one of the very few memories I have that include my dad. Was it a real memory? Was it just my dad and me or was there another dad there with his sons? Why could I remember that I had gone to the circus, but have ZERO actual memories of the evening?

The night my husband and daughter left to go to the circus, I locked myself in my office to get some writing accomplished. Of course, before I could write, I had to procrastinate by googling things like discount-airfare-Italy, clive-owen-images, and searching coach totes on eBay. And then I thought, maybe I could google the guy who went to the circus with my dad and me. I contemplated writing him an email, something like:

Hi,

It’s probably been over thirty years since you knew me, but I’m Norman’s daughter. I was wondering if you remember ever going to the circus with your sons, my dad, and me. I’m sure this is the most random email you’ve ever received, but I have this extremely vague memory and was just curious if it’s real or not.

Fortunately, I didn’t find his email address and couldn’t send him what would have been my most desperate email ever. And if he had answered the email, it would never have measured up to what happened the following evening.

So the night after the dads took the kiddos to the circus, they took us wives to eat sans kids. During appetizers, I told the other couple about my memory of being taken to the circus by my dad and his friend as well. I was talking about how it was weird because I couldn’t actually remember going to the circus, but I’m pretty sure I went and that I felt positive who went with us. I hadn’t talked about, seen, or heard from the friend of my father’s who went with us in years and years. But there I was naming his name and talking about a night that had happened thirty years ago.

And then…

Who walks into the restaurant but the friend of my father’s who went to the circus with me. I recognized him immediately because: 1.) he was fresh in my mind; and 2.) he was with other friends of my father who I’ve kept in touch with through the years and see about once every six months or so.

I was…dumbfounded. (I just looked up dumbfounded and it means exactly what I felt: To fill with astonishment and perplexity; confound.)

I don’t believe in coincidences and I think when we have questions for the universe; it gives us answers. Sometimes we have to look for them and sometimes they hand them right over as effortlessly as a waiter handing you your appetizers.

That night, I got to ask my dad’s friend if my memory was correct. His answer: “I can’t believe you remember that Amy, that must have been 30 years ago.”

How thrilling that was for me–to have a question about my father answered. The memories I have of my father are mostly imprints made from photos that sit framed on the bookshelves behind my desk, or the vaguest of vague recollections leftover from hearing other people tell stories. They’re not really my memories at all; they’re other people’s memories that I’ve remade as my own.

Except the circus. Now I know that the single slight memory I had of me and my dad hanging out was a real one.