Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

father moved us temporarily to Burnsville, North Carolina, likewise a mountain town, though lacking Blowing Rock’s altitude, scenic vistas, and seasonal gentrification. Our rented home on the outskirts of Burnsville was adjacent to the grounds of a defunct boarding school. One morning I awoke to a clamor, and from my window observed a multitude of brightly painted trucks and silver trailers filling the weedy campus next door.
    As men began to unload heavy rope, wooden poles, and giant rolls of canvas from flatbed lorries and panel vans, I remembered the posters I’d recently seen downtown and realized that a circus was setting up practically in my own backyard! Shaking with excitement, barely taking time to dress (was I wearing red and orange?), I raced out into the vortex of activity intent upon finding a job and seeing the show. I accomplished both, but more importantly, I encountered the flesh-bound instrument of secret wisdom and cosmic love torture who was to animate my fantasies and billow the embers of my yearning for the rest of my life.
    Her name was Bobbi. She was eleven -- an “older woman.” She had yellow hair that hung down to her waist and wore riding britches and black patent leather boots, the tops of which very nearly met the end of her tresses. And she had a snake: a pet blacksnake that she carried around the way an ordinary little girl might carry a doll. Bobbi’s right arm was tattooed with small scars, souvenirs of the many times the snake had bitten her. (It was an American racer, probably of the rather common Coluber constrictor subspecies, and obviously nonpoisonous.)
    Bobbi was both the most exotic and romantic creature I’d ever met, a preadolescent living embodiment of Tarzan’s Jane; of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; and though I had no clear notion of it then, of the feminine archetype to whom there clings an air of hidden knowledge, something strangely meaningful, equally nurturing and dangerous.
    It was because of Bobbi that at a tender age I became a lifetime member of that exclusive order of men who believe a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the universe. She was not yet in tights but it was no great stretch to project for her a life in spotlights at the top of the tent, swinging by her hair; or else pirouetting atop the bare back of a prancing stallion in the center ring. As thousands cheered.
    Bobbi was of the circus, born and bred. Her father was ringmaster and show manager; her mother -- billed on sideshow banners as “the Indestructible Woman” -- climbed twice daily, scantily clad, into a wooden coffinlike box through which about a dozen heavy swords one by one were driven. Bobbi -- beautiful, fearless, ever dramatic -- was a young goddess of the big top and I simply could not or cannot imagine an adulthood in which, as one of those so-called exotic dancers, she might hootchy her kootchy on a tawdry stage in the armless embrace of a burlesque boa constrictor.
    Forget Toni and Nancy, forget Gwendolyn Berryman. Bobbi was on another plane entirely, and I was not so much in love as in awe. It was, of course, unrequited, although she, generally deprived of playmates, seemed fond enough of my company. When I wasn’t watering the llamas, shoveling monkey poop, or performing those other chores in the menagerie tent that was earning me a pass to the main show, Bobbi and I hung out on the lot; and when my duties were done, we’d walk the short distance to my house and play board games or improvise scenes with my toy train set. Out of deference to my mother, the blacksnake would be left behind in its cage.
    On the second day (and I’m unsure quite how it transpired), Bobbi’s mom and dad came to lunch at our house. It must have seemed a bit surreal, the flamboyant ringmaster and the Indestructible Woman sitting at our dining room table eating soup and discussing the war (Pearl Harbor had been bombed six months earlier) with my parents. Nevertheless, lunch went