Good morning to you, Lou, and thanks for showing me the magic that is in the world and reminding me every day to look for it and never become one of the angry and joyless people our world seems to spawn in sch great numbers. It is snowing outside and there magic in that and you have inspired me to always look for the magic.

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A few weeks ago, I saw this wall board poster of Lou Jacobs, one of the most famous and loved clowns in the world, he was, for years, the symbol of RIngling Bros. Circus, due to shut down for good in May.  The wall board cost me $200, but it is priceless to me. I bought it right away and hung it on my study wall. It reminds me to never forget to keep the magic in my life and my work and my blog.

Lou died a decade ago, but I was fortunate to see him in several circuses, I traveled far and wide to see him perform with his mischievous Chihuahua Knucklehead, who often stole the show, and the tiny clowns who often performed with  him. He was over six feet tall.

To me, and to so many other weird and unhappy children, Lou, with his pork pie hat and big red nose, was the introduction to the idea of magic and mystery. When the circus dies in May, and the elephants disappear from our lives, some of the magic in life will die with them.

I will always remember taking the train to see Lou in Boston when I was 12 years old, I got a good seat up front and I remember him zipping past me in his motorized bath tub, splashing water everywhere, I was laughing to hard I was crying.

But Lou will sit over my should as I write to remind me of the importance of magic.Magic opens up the closed doors in us and brightens our souls. It is one of the things that makes being a human so wondrous, only we can see the magic.

One of the many reasons I love Maria so much is that she sees the magic in life, and makes magic. This morning, we went out into the arriving blizzard to feed the animals, and I looked over and saw Maria piling up some sticks in the pasture that the donkeys had been chewing on.

At first, she said, she piled them up to the animals could get to them when the snow got high. But then, she said, she thought they had made a lovely sculpture and so she took a video of it and showed it to me. Anyone else would have been shoveling and grousing about the storm, but Maria saw the magic in it.

So the sticks became a work of art.

So did I, I think, see magic out there, I took my camera out into the storm to photograph Red and the sheep and donkeys and birds. There is much magic in a blizzard, if you look for it. Today, we are stranded, we are expected more than two feet of snow,  and one of the things I love about where I live is that we don’t grouse or freak out much about snowstorms, they are a part of life, like breathing and living and dying.

The weather news presents them as dangerous catastrophes to be watched and feared, but I close my eyes and think of Lou Jacobs, wheeling around the ring in his tiny card, Knucklehead, popping out of his clown suit, whenever I first saw Lou I laughed harder than I had ever laughed, before and I think Lou taught me how to laugh as well.

Today I found a You Tube video of Lou Performing  while Dick Van Dyke had come to tape a show about him. Come and see him work, and see how much people loved him. I was often in the audience watching Lou, perhaps I was somewhere in the crowd.

You can see his website here.

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Thanks for being a clown, Lou, I confess I cried this morning when I watched it. I am so glad you are on my wall, you will keep the magic inside of me, I think. All day I will look for the magic in the blizzard.