The Calliope

He hadn’t ever intended on using it again. Everyone lives multiple lifetimes in one life if they’re lucky, and this was a relic from a life long since lived and put away. Now he was a successful man, running the sort of nondescript business successful men of a certain age and class and privilege always seem to. He ran his business, took care of his house, provided for his family – although his children were grown and out on their own – and pursued other hobbies. Golf, mostly. Tinkering in the garage. Things that blended in with his beige house and his beige job and his beige life. That hobby was cherry red and flashing gold and no matter how much he pretended to have moved on, a smaller part of him couldn’t help acknowledge that it was, and always had been, love.

He remembers so clearly the first day he saw it. A local museum, specializing in the weird and esoteric, was closing its doors, and though it had been able to find homes for many of its pieces, some were still for sale. Considering himself something of a history buff (a term his daughter, who studied history in grad school, didn’t like), he went. It was right inside the front door of the small, one-room museum, tucked into a corner. He wouldn’t have seen it at all if some of the spotlights in other display cases and over pedestals hadn’t sparked a dull, golden gleam in the corner of his eye. He turned, expecting coins or statuary, and instead: there it was. The box was candy apple red, with beautiful gold filigree. The symmetry of the design appealed to him as much as the color did – something soothing about seeing part of the pattern and knowing what to expect in the rest of it. On top, the golden pipes, shaped not as organ pipes but as a solid cylinder head, each with golden wire running to the keyboard. He walked over to it, studying the keys, skimming his fingers across the gold music stand. Sturdy black legs supporting the front, with what were clearly modern wheels – maybe from a bicycle? – in the back providing for ease of transportation. A museum worker had appeared, thrilled that someone was interested. They chatted for a while and when he found out it was actually for sale, he jumped on the chance. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money but it was still less than half of what you could expect to pay.

He took it home, knowing it would be the crown jewel in The Shed. The Shed was pride and joy for him: walking in took him back to going to circuses with his grandfather when he was a boy. HIs grandfather had loved circuses and he had loved his grandfather. He tagged along anytime one came to town, long after his cousins and siblings stopped attending out of boredom or embarrassment or rebellion. He loved the overwhelming feeling he got when he walked onto circus grounds: the smell of popcorn, of livestock, of candy apples; the sound of music coming from different tents, loudest from the main ring; the carnival barker and the swirling mass of humanity all coming together to take him away. And his grandfather’s stories, about the circuses he’d been to, the ones he thought about joining, each one more fantastic than the last (he was almost certain his grandfather hadn’t actually barely escaped with his life when he dared to pursue the beautiful girlfriend of a ringleader). It all came together to form a sensory memory that was central to his childhood, and walking into the shed brought it back vividly and immediately every single time. But there was something else there, too. A little bit of embarrassment, a little bit of shame. His cousins had figured out before he did that regular circus attendance into adolescence was prime bully bait. More than that, they figured out how to hide that they had actually enjoyed going. He never had, and so spent his early years in high school being mercilessly bullied whenever he mentioned the circus or asked if anyone was going to the next. He wrote reports, short stories, essays, all about the circus, and every time it happened: the whispers, the pinching, the taunting and name-calling after school. He learned eventually to hide his interest and he stopped going with his grandfather. His grandfather had died a few years later, and he never had the chance to tell him that he was sorry. That he had always loved him and the circus more than he hated being bullied and he was ashamed that he was embarrassed.

So as he rolled it into the shed, he felt this familiar and aching mix of joy and pride and shame and embarrassment. But for his grandfather, he learned to play it. And he loved it. There was a wild sense of abandonment that came with playing it. You couldn’t adjust the volume, as it was designed to be heard from miles away, so he couldn’t hide that he was playing it. He lived in the country and knew it was unlikely he’d be heard, but it helped unlock something in him anyway. Every time he played it felt like a giant fuck you to his bullies and a love letter to his grandfather and to the circuses.

He’d married eventually and become a father and it was put into storage – the whole collection. There was no way to play it, nowhere to store it conveniently, and he grew into middle age and away from the circus, although on certain nights when his kids made popcorn in the microwave, it took him back. Inevitably, he would visit the storage unit the next day, to see It and remind himself.

When the kids had grown and moved out, he and his wife moved, too, and it finally had a proper home. Their walkout basement, no longer needed as a home base for their teens, served as his own personal museum, and he was happy to have it on display again. Then one night, while sitting on the deck, he noticed the acoustics of their new neighborhood. When the wind blew in from the west, it did funny things to the ambient noise of the neighborhood. The bark of dogs that he knew well suddenly came from everywhere. Kids playing a few houses down were suddenly quieted as the wind carried their voices away somewhere else. And he could occasionally hear the sounds of the high school marching band practicing a few miles away. It made him think.

So one night, when there was a westerly wind, and it was dark enough to dull its candy apple red and there was no moon to burnish the pipes, he went to the basement and quietly slid open the door. He wheeled it oh so carefully onto the patio, shielded by the row of high shrubs that separated his yard from the neighbor’s. He sat down. Took a deep breath. Took another. Slowed his racing heart, and began to play. He was timid at first – waiting for neighbors to come out shouting. A few appeared on the decks and patios that ringed their pond, but they stood quietly, listening, asking each other who would open a circus on a Tuesday. And then silence, while they listened some more. And then started sharing their own stories.

After that, he would roll the calliope out when the conditions were just right – westerly wind, moonless night, his wife out with girlfriends – and he would play, and the neighbors would listen, and he would send the magical, overwhelming sound of his childhood out into the world and back into his heart.