Short Story: I belong to a writers group and we took a road trip to Hugo, Oklahoma to visit the Mount Olivet Cemetery where there is a special section dedicated to honoring the lives of circus owners, performers and workers. Hugo was the winter home of several circuses and there is still an elephant sanctuary nearby. I wrote the following poem for fun before we went, knowing nothing of the place. It is a fictional imagining. The actual plot was extremely touching to me. The sense of family and community was lovely and the personalized markers leave one feeling that they knew a bit about the subterranean tenant. So when you get to the bit where I imagine them in a better place than Hugo, Oklahoma, I now stand corrected. When I told my daughter about the visit, she remarked, “Just think, they all lived their lives just to make people happy.” So true. The markers tell the tale so well.

I’m not going to say who…but someone used to tell my brother and me when we were acting up…that if we were going to be clowns, we’d be put in a cardboard box with a peanut butter sandwich and sent off to the circus. And I’m now quite sure I would have fit right in and it was likely a very loyal family.

We took some flowers. If you visit, it seems a custom to leave pennies in honor of the circus performers. We took our pennies to the casino in Durant after a lunch in Atoka. To each his own.

Traveling Circus

From Dallas to Paris,
Hugo Bound
On a Hair-brained Quest
To Visit Dead Clowns

In a Truck Filled with Dreamers
Inventing Conflict and Wrongs
Passing Through Ghost Towns
Writing Stories and Songs.

Would that they Lived! Acrobats, Giants.
Siamese Twins and the Dancers so Pliant.
Bring out the Cannon. Shoot a Man to the Stars!
Or a Bearded Lady To Take us To Bars.
We Would Watch the Trapeze Girl Tame the Ringmaster
While Lions and Tigers Promise Potential Disaster.

But, No. We will only Look at their Markers.
No Cotton Candy or Carnival Barkers.
Bull Riders in a Section Down to the Left.
The Elephants, Retired. Left Alone and Bereft.

Someday they will All be Together Again
In a Heaven for Entertainers, Carnies, and Friends.
In a Paradise Better than this one they Found
In Hugo, Oklahoma, in a Graveyard for Clowns.

Tonight we will Gamble.
Turn Pennies to Tears.
Some will Lose Nothing
And Buy all the Beers.
But Writers We Are
And Before it’s All Told
We’ll Make Oklahoma Miles
Into Words of Fool’s Gold.

One of our troop, who will remain a mystery (writer), unless you need a serious criminal attorney, grew up in Hugo and hatched this brilliant scheme. Good fun.