Send in the clowns

A prospective buyer asked to see the house today. I left early and brought a few boxes of books I no longer want to the local public library. The woman who greeted me was very kind and found a friendly young man to help me unload them onto a book cart. When I asked if I could get a receipt for what I brought he told me to go to the front desk and someone would help me. At the front desk I asked the man behind the counter. He repeated what I asked. His eyes squinted while he said what I said and he said it as a question. He was sneering. I replied, "Yes." He asked where were the books I brought. I told him they had already been unloaded and in the back. He walked to the back. He returned. He looked at the woman at the same desk next to him and asked her where the receipts were. She told him. She watched him and corrected him as he picked up the wrong form. He gave me a sheet and told me to fill it out, which I did. As I was writing another man came up next to me and started talking to the man behind the counter, who in return made a shooing sound while pushing his fingers outward towards the new man. The man moved back. "People need their private space," the library man told me. I gave him the form and asked for another since I would be bringing more later and would fill it out before I returned with the books. He gave me one and he took my receipt. He said "thank you."

"But I need the receipt." He looked at me annoyed and perplexed. Waving the filled blue form in his hand he asked the woman next to him what does one do when "they" ask for a receipt. She looked at him nonplussed and said, "We give him the one you're holding." He handed it back to me, said "here," and in the same breath "next," while he beckoned the person behind me.

When I got back to the house I decided to go through the other boxes of books I have and list what I was giving away. In one I found a series of children's puzzles a fellow teacher had given me a while back. I was fascinated by the imagery. Clowns are a strange concept, slightly titillating yet more ominous and frightening. My friend Nancy is afraid of clowns. I once found an unglazed ceramic squirrel that had the face like Chip or Dale from Walt Disney. So grotesque I saw its hidden potential, I painted it as a clown in lurid colors and gave it to Nancy, not because of her coulrophobia but to replace the nasty garden gnome someone else had given her. I had another friend (let's call her Jan) who despised clowns too. Her mother confessed to her when Jan was in her thirties that Jan had an older brother, the progeny of both Jan's parents. He was conceived out of wedlock (the father claimed he was sterile from the radiation at Bimini Atoll), and placed for adoption. Chas, the son had found Jan's mother and wanted to meet the whole family. He lived in San Diego and when Jan called me in Oakland to tell me the story, I replied I was flying down to meet them, not wanting to miss the event. Chas was married to a born-again Christian woman who belonged to a clown ministry. Her avatar was "Son Shine." Son Shine's ice breaker is to pull out a head of lettuce and say, "Let us pray." I heard a report on the radio a few years ago that eighty percent of clowns in this country belong to Christian clown ministries. My titillation has now been replaced with dread. I prefer the less obvious kind, those clueless individuals who have no idea what their role is in the world, face it each day without greasepaint and do as best they can.