26 June 2020 – Oh, forget the Circus of Sunshine. Here comes the Circus of Pleasure — pleasure for its lithe young participants, and for anyone else in Jonathan Rogers Park at the time, who happens to notice them.

I almost don’t.

I’m busy watching a patient woman tirelessly hurling a ball (from one of those hurling sticks) for her eager Border Collie. Again & again, he streaks across the field to chase it and then prances back in triumph the way they do, all head tosses, quick paws and waving tail.

So I almost miss the other performance on offer. This one is human, very quiet by comparison, and limited to the dimensions of the young man’s body length on the grass.

Still, something makes me look beyond the oblivious couple just there on the lip of the park’s main bowl of space … and notice that other couple straight-line beyond them, mid-field.

Really? She’s not just getting all friendly with her boyfriend? (As in: oh please, we are decorous Canadians, save it for home?) No, she’s not. This is serious acrobatics.

I start paying attention. Look: a series of moves, one foot in each of her partner’s hands.

And look: now hands to hands, her hips to his feet, and stretched horizontal above him.

And keep looking: the moment of levering upright to a hands-on-hands handstand.

I am slightly tempted to  tell you she held a flawless handstand for 5 seconds before precisely folding her way back to earth. But that would be a lie. She held the pose barely a nano-second before over-balancing and crash landing on the turf.

There is no need, no motivation, to lie. Indeed, a lie would disrespect them. Distant as I am, I can hear their laughter. They want to get it right — but they are also just having an extremely good time, enjoying their strength and their skill and each other and the fresh breezy day.