A twelve year old wears the Great Tramp's soul
It was made of thin, shiny plastic, and was certain to crack if I attempted any of the manual acrobatics he pulled off with such panache.
Atop my head, then, it would remain, as precious to me as a gold crown. As long as that bowler sat atop my head, we were spiritual brothers he and I, identical in our smallness, our sense of being at odds with the world, our funniness.
We were one, too, when it came to women; what heights he would have to reach, what physical tricks he would have to perform to win them over.
The one that eluded me was no 1920s beauty but the logic of first crushes is as difficult to explain as one of his great slapstick tricks.
When, after all of my physical vulnerability, facial gesticulating, and clever improvisation, she informed me that she was warming up to me, my twelve year old heart soared.
A few days later, I returned from school to find my crying mother sitting in a car. "Get in!," she ordered. "Where are we going?", I asked. "In!!!", she reiterated.
I did as I was told. As the car rolled past the brown towers in which we lived, I shot a look at the balcony of the girl. I knew, somehow, that I was never coming back to her, that my mother's most recent marriage had suffered a serious severance, and that we were on our way, possessions be damned, to a new life God knew where.
I knew then all that he, Chaplin, had known: life at the hands of an emotionally unbalanced mother, an unwitting kinship with the road, the inability to form lasting connections.
But I was worse off, even, than he - not even able to take my hat along as life's companion.
