Recently, I was prompted to rummage through the back of a memory drawer by a MetaFilter thread on the circus. In the thread, a poster noted that the classic big-top incarnation of the American circus ended with a terrible and deadly fire in the 1940s.

I found this very puzzling, as I have distinct personal memories of having attended a tented, saw-dusted, circus. Horse acts and elephants parading, Clowns in a car and trapeze artists and tumbling acrobats. A top-hatted master of ceremonies and a uniformed brass band in the bleacher seats.

Interestingly, I also have a memory of attending a public concert given by a uniformed brass band on a gazebo-like bandstand, a memory seemingly ripped from a Ray Bradbury novel. However, my father, an inveterate gadgeteer, actually taped this concert on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder he had purchased for use as an innovative correspondence mechanism while we spent a year abroad. I have both tape and machine and have listened to the brassy strains of that summer afternoon within the past five years. I began an audio-capture project on this and other tapes about eight years ago, but it was just before hard drive costs went into free-fall and space constraints caused me to abandon it.

Given that one improbable time-traveling memory should prove indisputably real, it stands to reason that another might as well. Yet, the circus impressions I retain are clearly early-childhood memories, so I had assumed that the recollection might have been crossed wires derived from a media-based experience such as a movie.

On today’s drive in to the airport with my parents, I had the early-morning presence of mind to ask them if I had ever attended a tented circus.

To my surprise, they said that I had, during the year we lived in Chile over 1968 to 1969. Dad said the circus set up their tents in a dry riverbed near the town we lived in, Vi&ntlide;a del Mar, which held some futbol pitches. His mention of this conjured up another layer of lost sense-memory – a panoramic hubbub of yellow dust, the bustle of the midway and crew, the tent itself looming up against a midsummer backdrop of browned bluffs above the riverbed.

Mom and Dad did note that they don’t recall the tent as a true three-ring wonder, and I guess that jibes with my recollections as well.

(Posted at the boarding gate from the phone with the intent of adding links later, to Viña del Mar and to the MeFi thread, among others. UPDATE: link’d!)

UPDATE II: Things has an inspired essay on the developent and practice of the English Victorian spectacle, a close cousin to the circus.