The Clown Always Won Out

I still remember the Labor Day weekends of my childhood. Memories etched in like the words to Ice Ice Baby or U Can't Touch This or Friends in Low Places.

Late summer in western Oklahoma has a smell you can stand inside of. Dust lifted off a dirt road and never quite settling. Cut grass gone sweet and brown at the edges. Livestock, leather, hay warm in the sun. The heat still coming up off the ground at eight in the evening, long after the light has gone low and gold.

Labor Day weekend was the Rodeo of Champions in Elk City, out at the rodeo grounds. Three days, Friday through Sunday.

On Friday at school everyone dressed for it, cowboy or rodeo. I did not have boots. So the clown always won out as my costume. The clowns and the rodeo folks came through the school that morning and handed out tickets for best dressed. By that night they were in the arena under the lights. Saturday was the parade. Monday we had off.

I went for the bullfighting. Not the riders. The clowns. They put themselves between a cowboy on the ground and an animal that weighed a ton and wanted him. A barrel, their own feet, a hand laid on a horn. They made it look like play. I understand now why I have gone as a clown for Halloween more times than I can count.

The weekend held three things at once. My grandma Peña's birthday. The parade. The rodeo.

Driving into town and parking at grandma and grandpa Peña's house on 1st Street. Walking up the alley to 3rd to gather as much candy as possible.

Then the celebration, a cake and a card for her. She always had the most delicious sweet tea and homemade tortillas.

And then the rodeo, one of the nights, if money allowed.

So there was the parade, and there was the arena, and there was a house with her at the center of it, and the three never came apart in my memory. She is the reason La Reina exists.

That is the part I kept. Everyone watches the eight seconds. I watched the men who stayed in after the buzzer to protect the others. And I watched a woman who did the same thing protecting her kids and grandchildren without an arena.

The seasons turned in New York. In Los Angeles they do not. I still mark it that weekend. The scent, the dirt, the hay.

Dillon