Circus City
Peter Obourn
Until I found the box in the attic, my mother was a mystery to me.
Her job is, she sells cars (a piece of information I hope my friends are not aware of), but I do help her practice by being the customer. “I’m just looking,” I say.
“Take your time, honey,” she’ll say. (Never push.)
I’ll say, “You know, I’m not sure I’m ready to buy.”
“Life is short,” she’ll say. (This is not pushing.)
“I’m a business person,” I’ll say. “Is a convertible a good investment?”
“If you want an investment, buy stocks. A car is a friend, a companion, a person,” she’ll say. (This is redirection.)
She’s not like other mothers. My room is super neat because she insists that everything must be put away and the bed made with tight corners as soon as I get up. She and Dad and I eat all our meals together, and she makes us talk about what we are doing and what our friends are doing, and then we have to clean up and wash the dishes and put them away before anything else. I have lots of dumb jobs like doing the dishes and raking the lawn and dusting stuff and taking out the trash. None of my friends’ mothers are like that.
Sometimes she’ll just sit with a faraway look, and my father will say, “Let her be, she’s at the circus,” which I used to think was just his way of saying she was daydreaming. Then one day I found the box in the attic. There was a lot of stuff in it. The best thing was a circus poster. The poster showed a girl on a flying trapeze and said, in huge letters:
THE ASTOUNDING MARIA MANCINI
OF THE FLYING MANCINIS
In the background, below the flying girl, was a circus ring filled with acrobats, clowns, dancing horses, jugglers, a ringmaster, and stands full of astounded people under a huge big top. At the bottom it said: FLEMING CIRCUS – 26 ACTS – COMING TO GARRET CITY, IOWA, JULY 21 AND JULY 22, TWO SHOWS EACH DAY – PARADE THURSDAY MORNING. The poster was a little beat up—folded twice—but big and colorful and would look good on my bedroom wall, especially because my name is Maria too. For some reason my mother was thrilled. “Sometimes your dad puts things away and I can’t find them,” she said, and she insisted we go through the whole box together.
“Here’s a new game,” she said, looking at her watch. “Tell me when a minute is up. Count to yourself. Go!” I tried to count and then I lost track, and finally I said stop and she said that was only thirty-seven seconds, and then I took her watch and said go. She picked up a pile of old postcards out of the box and thumbed through them, then stood up, walked out of the room and came back, sat down, looked me in the eye, slapped the table, and said stop, and it was exactly one minute. “I practiced my moves on the trampoline every day,” she said, looking up at the poster, “but in the air, timing is more important. Timing was essential. George, Steve, and I had to practice counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—like that. We’d chant together and count like a little singing group, and then George would say, ‘Okay, a hundred.’ Then each of us would silently count and slap the table when we hit a hundred. One hundred SLAP! like that—over and over until we all did it at exactly the same instant. We had to be exactly on time every time, within a tenth of a second. The hard part is, when you’re flying, time slows down and flows—like water. Another part of you has to keep track of exact time. When you let go of that trapeze bar, you go up—you fly, you are weightless. You feel the air, smell it, see it, the shafts of spotlight piercing the smoke and hitting you, the smell of the circus. I was above it all, alone, a little girl, flying.”
I looked at my mother, who had her faraway look, and then at the poster and then back at her again. “Are you saying…?” I said, but I didn’t know what she was saying.
“Now you know why we named you Maria,” she said. “You thought I was just the best car saleswoman in Park City. Isn’t life full of surprises?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Your name isn’t Maria. And who’s George? Who’s Steve?”
“Well, let’s see,” she said. “I was in an act with two men, George and Steve. We were called the Flying Mancinis. George was called Georgio and Steve was Francesco. I was Maria. They were supposed to be brothers and I was their niece. That’s what our posters said. George was the catcher.”
“The catcher?” I said. “What kind of act has a catcher?”
“A trapeze act. For four years I was the star of the circus, skinny little Sally Jones from the middle of Florida. I learned it all from George. My parents were jugglers. I had been one of the Little Tumblers. I could do cartwheels and flips better than the others. George’s wife was pregnant. So I was picked to be a Flying Mancini. I did it for four years. George made us practice at least four hours a day. Together we checked every piece of equipment before every practice and before every performance, tied every knot, put up every swing and tested it. The most important thing is to know how to fall. Everybody falls. You have to learn to fall exactly the right way. You have to relax when you fall, not tense up. Trust the net.
“We practiced our moves on the trampoline every day but timing is more important. Timing is essential. We had to be exactly on time every time, within a tenth of a second. Think about a tenth of a second. How long is that? That’s how long we had to make a catch work. Even that tenth of a second gets broken down into parts. When you first feel the hair on the arm of the catcher with your fingertips, that’s when the tenth of a second starts. Then, for the rest of the tenth of a second, as you close your hand, one finger at a time, you adjust your grip. At the same time, you feel his hand wrap around your arm as you each squeeze tighter and tighter. It has to be perfect or you fall. You have to do all that in midair, in a tenth of a second. As you’re doing it, as you focus on all the steps, it seems much longer, but that’s all it is: a tenth of a second.
“One night, in Covington, Kentucky, on the Ohio River across from Cincinnati, people from Ringling Brothers came and watched me. They’d heard about the skinny little girl. They said I was something special. They wanted me. I talked about it with my parents and with George and Steve and everybody. I wasn’t sure. The Ringling people said think about it. The next two winters Ringling would call my dad in Florida and ask if I was still thinking about it.
“Then, my last season, when I was not skinny anymore, Steve told my parents he wanted to marry me. I was sixteen, Steve was thirty. My dad said absolutely not. Steve was okay with that. Maybe he expected it. I don’t know. He’s kind of an easygoing guy. There was a performance that same night, and Steve and I said we’d do it, and Dad said okay, we were professionals. George refused. He was angry. He called Steve a fool and said he’d ruined everything. He and Steve went on alone that night. Steve decided to try a double. I thought sure George would drop him on purpose. When they did the double, it was very close. It all took less than a second. Steve was a little off. George was supposed to hang from his knees on the bar, but he realized Steve was late, so when Steve was in midair doing his double somersault, George slipped down so that only his ankles and toes were on the bar. He caught Steve with just his hands in the last little bit of that tenth of a second. I still remember the gasp of the crowd—one huge intake of air. The crowd was nervous the rest of the night. Even the dog act was off. The dogs knew.
“That was the end of it, that night Steve proposed. I never performed again.
“My parents asked me if I wanted to go to Ringling Brothers. Ringling would take me without George or Steve. It would be a lot of money and I’d be a star. I said what I really wanted was to be an ordinary girl and go to high school. That November I enrolled full time in Park City High School. My parents found the little house here, and my aunt came and stayed with me while the circus traveled. I spent almost two full school years right here at Park City High School. I was way behind at first, but I ended up on the honor roll.”
When I went to bed, I looked through the box. There were letters from her parents, a couple from Ringling Brothers, but no letters from Steve. There were six postcards, the ones she had picked out of the box earlier, from places I never heard of in six different states, addressed to her and signed Steve, with no message.
We live in Park City, which is kind of like in the middle of Florida. The next day she said she was taking me to Circus City. We drove through downtown, past the warehouses, across the tracks, then stopped next to a big, empty lot. “How much further?” I said. She smiled. We got out of the car and sat together on a park bench covered with graffiti, looking out on an almost flat expanse of dirt and clumps of crabgrass, about ten treeless acres. “Welcome to Circus City,” she said.
“Mom, this is nothing,” I said. “It’s just dirt.”
“No, Maria, right here is a little city. We parked our trailer here from November through February every year. This place is the only place I can call home, although I was here only four months a year. You can still see it on old road maps dating back to the 1940s and ’50s. After that Park City grew around Circus City, and the name Circus City disappeared from the road maps.
“Our caravan traveled from March to October, from small town to county fairgrounds, Florida to Texas, then up to the border of Canada but never into Canada. By July we’d be heading east to New England until Labor Day, then slowly back here to Circus City by November. At each stop, during the night, we raised our huge tent and turned an empty field into a land of magic and fantasy. Then, after a few days, after the last show, in only a few hours, again in the dark, we turned it into an empty, trodden, muddy field again. Before dawn we were on the road again. We didn’t follow the railroad like the big circuses. We followed the highways, mostly the blue highways.
“The Fleming Circus is gone now. It folded a couple years after I left. It happened all over the country. There used to be a circus that came to every town. There were a few famous three-ring circuses and countless smaller ones like ours that toured rural towns. Even though we could draw crowds wherever we went, it was only for a few days, at most a week, and then we had to take down the big top and move on to the next town. It was how we existed, how we subsisted. We were a traveling troupe of nomads. Everybody in my circus is gone, scattered around the globe—some back to eastern Europe, some to Asia, Europe, the Americas, to everywhere, because that’s home for them.”
I looked around the empty lot, trying to picture it full of trailers and tents and animals and people and trampolines. I couldn’t, but I looked at my mother, and I knew that she could.
“Every family had a trailer, and all the trailers went all over the country together. The trailers were our little houses. I even had my own tiny room. It was this big,” she said, spreading her arms and making a pirouette. “Everything I owned was in that room, stored in nook or cranny, under my bed, above my head, inside a footstool. If you got one thing out, you had to put it back before you got the next thing out.
“The big top was put up over there and stayed up, and that was where we ate every meal, all of us together, everybody—the artists, the clowns, the trainers, the musicians.”
“Did you have midgets?” I said.
“Well, I guess we did, but they were just ordinary people to me. The circus is real. It’s real life—real smells all together in a hot, huge tent of animals and canvas and popcorn and cigars and cotton candy and straw and hay and mud and sweat—real smells—not air freshener or dryer sheets.”
“Tell me more about Steve,” I said.
“I still think about him,” she said, looking out across the crabgrass as if he were standing there. “I could always tell what Steve was thinking, and I knew he knew what I was thinking. One thing we did was that George would catch Steve and then Steve would catch me. George’s catch was sure but strong, like he doubted me a little and had to do it all himself. Steve’s catch was gentle, more trusting, more sure. He knew I was strong and I would do my part of the catch. I know I’ll never be that close to anyone again. I’m not sure I want to be. I didn’t love him. He was the daring young man on the flying trapeze, etcetera, and he was nice to me.”
“What did you two talk about?” I said.
“About the act. About our timing. Our moves.”
“That’s all?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “Steve’s not a big talker. He didn’t even tell me he wanted to marry me. He just asked my dad. That’s how I found out.”
The next morning Mom was gone. Dad told me not to worry. He took the poster down, put it back in the box, and put the box back in the attic. “Let’s go get her,” he said. In the car he said, “Opening that box was not a good idea. Your mother came from another planet. Another whole world of people she loved and, except for Gramma and Grampa Jones, will never see or hear from again. She was torn from them one day when she was sixteen years old. To you and me the circus is magical—to her it’s real.”
There she was, in Circus City, sitting on the bench. Dad sat on one side of her and I sat on the other. “I put the box back in the attic,” he said. “Shall we leave it there for a while?”
“OK,” said Mom, looking out across the field of dirt.
“Mom,” I said, “you told me yesterday you could tell what Steve was thinking.” She turned and looked at me. “So how come you didn’t know he wanted to marry you?”
She looked across the dirt, blinked her eyes, and said, “Well, maybe not everything.” Then she looked out again, cocked her head like the dirt had changed, and said, “It’s funny how sometimes when you talk about somebody you realize things about them you hadn’t realized before, like there was a drawer in your brain you’d forgotten about. Inside that drawer was a slip of paper that said, You really didn’t know Steve, did you.” Then she gave Dad and me each a big hug and said, “Let’s go home.”
On the way home she said, “I got over Steve pretty quick. At Park City High School, I had a boyfriend. We went to the prom together. He gave me a corsage and rented a limo. We talked about chemistry. I loved his brain. He taught me that all the elements that make up everything, from hydrogen to uranium, were created in the first few seconds of the universe, and if you compress the billions of years since then into one year, all recorded history is just the last ten seconds, so I suppose my time in the circus was a lot less than a tenth of a second. He didn’t propose to me. He didn’t even try to kiss me. It was ordinary and mysterious and wonderful.”
“The perfect man,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I wanted him to kiss me.”
“So when did you meet Dad?”
“I just told you—in high school.”
“But you said he didn’t ask you to marry him.”
“I asked him.”
We still play the car-selling game where I pretend to be a customer, but I never pretend I’m from the circus. So far Mom’s other planet has stayed in the attic, but sometimes I do catch her with that faraway look, and I know she is visiting.
Peter Obourn
Until I found the box in the attic, my mother was a mystery to me.
Her job is, she sells cars (a piece of information I hope my friends are not aware of), but I do help her practice by being the customer. “I’m just looking,” I say.
“Take your time, honey,” she’ll say. (Never push.)
I’ll say, “You know, I’m not sure I’m ready to buy.”
“Life is short,” she’ll say. (This is not pushing.)
“I’m a business person,” I’ll say. “Is a convertible a good investment?”
“If you want an investment, buy stocks. A car is a friend, a companion, a person,” she’ll say. (This is redirection.)
She’s not like other mothers. My room is super neat because she insists that everything must be put away and the bed made with tight corners as soon as I get up. She and Dad and I eat all our meals together, and she makes us talk about what we are doing and what our friends are doing, and then we have to clean up and wash the dishes and put them away before anything else. I have lots of dumb jobs like doing the dishes and raking the lawn and dusting stuff and taking out the trash. None of my friends’ mothers are like that.
Sometimes she’ll just sit with a faraway look, and my father will say, “Let her be, she’s at the circus,” which I used to think was just his way of saying she was daydreaming. Then one day I found the box in the attic. There was a lot of stuff in it. The best thing was a circus poster. The poster showed a girl on a flying trapeze and said, in huge letters:
THE ASTOUNDING MARIA MANCINI
OF THE FLYING MANCINIS
In the background, below the flying girl, was a circus ring filled with acrobats, clowns, dancing horses, jugglers, a ringmaster, and stands full of astounded people under a huge big top. At the bottom it said: FLEMING CIRCUS – 26 ACTS – COMING TO GARRET CITY, IOWA, JULY 21 AND JULY 22, TWO SHOWS EACH DAY – PARADE THURSDAY MORNING. The poster was a little beat up—folded twice—but big and colorful and would look good on my bedroom wall, especially because my name is Maria too. For some reason my mother was thrilled. “Sometimes your dad puts things away and I can’t find them,” she said, and she insisted we go through the whole box together.
“Here’s a new game,” she said, looking at her watch. “Tell me when a minute is up. Count to yourself. Go!” I tried to count and then I lost track, and finally I said stop and she said that was only thirty-seven seconds, and then I took her watch and said go. She picked up a pile of old postcards out of the box and thumbed through them, then stood up, walked out of the room and came back, sat down, looked me in the eye, slapped the table, and said stop, and it was exactly one minute. “I practiced my moves on the trampoline every day,” she said, looking up at the poster, “but in the air, timing is more important. Timing was essential. George, Steve, and I had to practice counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—like that. We’d chant together and count like a little singing group, and then George would say, ‘Okay, a hundred.’ Then each of us would silently count and slap the table when we hit a hundred. One hundred SLAP! like that—over and over until we all did it at exactly the same instant. We had to be exactly on time every time, within a tenth of a second. The hard part is, when you’re flying, time slows down and flows—like water. Another part of you has to keep track of exact time. When you let go of that trapeze bar, you go up—you fly, you are weightless. You feel the air, smell it, see it, the shafts of spotlight piercing the smoke and hitting you, the smell of the circus. I was above it all, alone, a little girl, flying.”
I looked at my mother, who had her faraway look, and then at the poster and then back at her again. “Are you saying…?” I said, but I didn’t know what she was saying.
“Now you know why we named you Maria,” she said. “You thought I was just the best car saleswoman in Park City. Isn’t life full of surprises?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Your name isn’t Maria. And who’s George? Who’s Steve?”
“Well, let’s see,” she said. “I was in an act with two men, George and Steve. We were called the Flying Mancinis. George was called Georgio and Steve was Francesco. I was Maria. They were supposed to be brothers and I was their niece. That’s what our posters said. George was the catcher.”
“The catcher?” I said. “What kind of act has a catcher?”
“A trapeze act. For four years I was the star of the circus, skinny little Sally Jones from the middle of Florida. I learned it all from George. My parents were jugglers. I had been one of the Little Tumblers. I could do cartwheels and flips better than the others. George’s wife was pregnant. So I was picked to be a Flying Mancini. I did it for four years. George made us practice at least four hours a day. Together we checked every piece of equipment before every practice and before every performance, tied every knot, put up every swing and tested it. The most important thing is to know how to fall. Everybody falls. You have to learn to fall exactly the right way. You have to relax when you fall, not tense up. Trust the net.
“We practiced our moves on the trampoline every day but timing is more important. Timing is essential. We had to be exactly on time every time, within a tenth of a second. Think about a tenth of a second. How long is that? That’s how long we had to make a catch work. Even that tenth of a second gets broken down into parts. When you first feel the hair on the arm of the catcher with your fingertips, that’s when the tenth of a second starts. Then, for the rest of the tenth of a second, as you close your hand, one finger at a time, you adjust your grip. At the same time, you feel his hand wrap around your arm as you each squeeze tighter and tighter. It has to be perfect or you fall. You have to do all that in midair, in a tenth of a second. As you’re doing it, as you focus on all the steps, it seems much longer, but that’s all it is: a tenth of a second.
“One night, in Covington, Kentucky, on the Ohio River across from Cincinnati, people from Ringling Brothers came and watched me. They’d heard about the skinny little girl. They said I was something special. They wanted me. I talked about it with my parents and with George and Steve and everybody. I wasn’t sure. The Ringling people said think about it. The next two winters Ringling would call my dad in Florida and ask if I was still thinking about it.
“Then, my last season, when I was not skinny anymore, Steve told my parents he wanted to marry me. I was sixteen, Steve was thirty. My dad said absolutely not. Steve was okay with that. Maybe he expected it. I don’t know. He’s kind of an easygoing guy. There was a performance that same night, and Steve and I said we’d do it, and Dad said okay, we were professionals. George refused. He was angry. He called Steve a fool and said he’d ruined everything. He and Steve went on alone that night. Steve decided to try a double. I thought sure George would drop him on purpose. When they did the double, it was very close. It all took less than a second. Steve was a little off. George was supposed to hang from his knees on the bar, but he realized Steve was late, so when Steve was in midair doing his double somersault, George slipped down so that only his ankles and toes were on the bar. He caught Steve with just his hands in the last little bit of that tenth of a second. I still remember the gasp of the crowd—one huge intake of air. The crowd was nervous the rest of the night. Even the dog act was off. The dogs knew.
“That was the end of it, that night Steve proposed. I never performed again.
“My parents asked me if I wanted to go to Ringling Brothers. Ringling would take me without George or Steve. It would be a lot of money and I’d be a star. I said what I really wanted was to be an ordinary girl and go to high school. That November I enrolled full time in Park City High School. My parents found the little house here, and my aunt came and stayed with me while the circus traveled. I spent almost two full school years right here at Park City High School. I was way behind at first, but I ended up on the honor roll.”
When I went to bed, I looked through the box. There were letters from her parents, a couple from Ringling Brothers, but no letters from Steve. There were six postcards, the ones she had picked out of the box earlier, from places I never heard of in six different states, addressed to her and signed Steve, with no message.
We live in Park City, which is kind of like in the middle of Florida. The next day she said she was taking me to Circus City. We drove through downtown, past the warehouses, across the tracks, then stopped next to a big, empty lot. “How much further?” I said. She smiled. We got out of the car and sat together on a park bench covered with graffiti, looking out on an almost flat expanse of dirt and clumps of crabgrass, about ten treeless acres. “Welcome to Circus City,” she said.
“Mom, this is nothing,” I said. “It’s just dirt.”
“No, Maria, right here is a little city. We parked our trailer here from November through February every year. This place is the only place I can call home, although I was here only four months a year. You can still see it on old road maps dating back to the 1940s and ’50s. After that Park City grew around Circus City, and the name Circus City disappeared from the road maps.
“Our caravan traveled from March to October, from small town to county fairgrounds, Florida to Texas, then up to the border of Canada but never into Canada. By July we’d be heading east to New England until Labor Day, then slowly back here to Circus City by November. At each stop, during the night, we raised our huge tent and turned an empty field into a land of magic and fantasy. Then, after a few days, after the last show, in only a few hours, again in the dark, we turned it into an empty, trodden, muddy field again. Before dawn we were on the road again. We didn’t follow the railroad like the big circuses. We followed the highways, mostly the blue highways.
“The Fleming Circus is gone now. It folded a couple years after I left. It happened all over the country. There used to be a circus that came to every town. There were a few famous three-ring circuses and countless smaller ones like ours that toured rural towns. Even though we could draw crowds wherever we went, it was only for a few days, at most a week, and then we had to take down the big top and move on to the next town. It was how we existed, how we subsisted. We were a traveling troupe of nomads. Everybody in my circus is gone, scattered around the globe—some back to eastern Europe, some to Asia, Europe, the Americas, to everywhere, because that’s home for them.”
I looked around the empty lot, trying to picture it full of trailers and tents and animals and people and trampolines. I couldn’t, but I looked at my mother, and I knew that she could.
“Every family had a trailer, and all the trailers went all over the country together. The trailers were our little houses. I even had my own tiny room. It was this big,” she said, spreading her arms and making a pirouette. “Everything I owned was in that room, stored in nook or cranny, under my bed, above my head, inside a footstool. If you got one thing out, you had to put it back before you got the next thing out.
“The big top was put up over there and stayed up, and that was where we ate every meal, all of us together, everybody—the artists, the clowns, the trainers, the musicians.”
“Did you have midgets?” I said.
“Well, I guess we did, but they were just ordinary people to me. The circus is real. It’s real life—real smells all together in a hot, huge tent of animals and canvas and popcorn and cigars and cotton candy and straw and hay and mud and sweat—real smells—not air freshener or dryer sheets.”
“Tell me more about Steve,” I said.
“I still think about him,” she said, looking out across the crabgrass as if he were standing there. “I could always tell what Steve was thinking, and I knew he knew what I was thinking. One thing we did was that George would catch Steve and then Steve would catch me. George’s catch was sure but strong, like he doubted me a little and had to do it all himself. Steve’s catch was gentle, more trusting, more sure. He knew I was strong and I would do my part of the catch. I know I’ll never be that close to anyone again. I’m not sure I want to be. I didn’t love him. He was the daring young man on the flying trapeze, etcetera, and he was nice to me.”
“What did you two talk about?” I said.
“About the act. About our timing. Our moves.”
“That’s all?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “Steve’s not a big talker. He didn’t even tell me he wanted to marry me. He just asked my dad. That’s how I found out.”
The next morning Mom was gone. Dad told me not to worry. He took the poster down, put it back in the box, and put the box back in the attic. “Let’s go get her,” he said. In the car he said, “Opening that box was not a good idea. Your mother came from another planet. Another whole world of people she loved and, except for Gramma and Grampa Jones, will never see or hear from again. She was torn from them one day when she was sixteen years old. To you and me the circus is magical—to her it’s real.”
There she was, in Circus City, sitting on the bench. Dad sat on one side of her and I sat on the other. “I put the box back in the attic,” he said. “Shall we leave it there for a while?”
“OK,” said Mom, looking out across the field of dirt.
“Mom,” I said, “you told me yesterday you could tell what Steve was thinking.” She turned and looked at me. “So how come you didn’t know he wanted to marry you?”
She looked across the dirt, blinked her eyes, and said, “Well, maybe not everything.” Then she looked out again, cocked her head like the dirt had changed, and said, “It’s funny how sometimes when you talk about somebody you realize things about them you hadn’t realized before, like there was a drawer in your brain you’d forgotten about. Inside that drawer was a slip of paper that said, You really didn’t know Steve, did you.” Then she gave Dad and me each a big hug and said, “Let’s go home.”
On the way home she said, “I got over Steve pretty quick. At Park City High School, I had a boyfriend. We went to the prom together. He gave me a corsage and rented a limo. We talked about chemistry. I loved his brain. He taught me that all the elements that make up everything, from hydrogen to uranium, were created in the first few seconds of the universe, and if you compress the billions of years since then into one year, all recorded history is just the last ten seconds, so I suppose my time in the circus was a lot less than a tenth of a second. He didn’t propose to me. He didn’t even try to kiss me. It was ordinary and mysterious and wonderful.”
“The perfect man,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I wanted him to kiss me.”
“So when did you meet Dad?”
“I just told you—in high school.”
“But you said he didn’t ask you to marry him.”
“I asked him.”
We still play the car-selling game where I pretend to be a customer, but I never pretend I’m from the circus. So far Mom’s other planet has stayed in the attic, but sometimes I do catch her with that faraway look, and I know she is visiting.
