The Circus World We Live In
Reflective Memoir in Tandem with Perilous Times
It has been weeks now since a photograph from early childhood passed into my mind’s eye almost like a kind of clairvoyant presentation surfacing.
It was a photograph clear as if I were looking at it in front of me.
The vision appeared for me inside my conscious mind. It showed me a child in face paint to match her father’s face paint.
It was me.
I was smiling. Happy. So was my father.
It was the perfect day.
Where was that picture, I wondered?
It is March of 2026 now. We experienced a significant move this past fall.
It wasn’t a move that was far, but it was two different apartment homes merging into one.
Every item from my mother’s old rental that were to be specifically saved went into our newly rented storage unit first and foremost.
”Pack everything up that is irreplaceable,” I told her.
“Photographs, important official paperwork… anything you would not want to lose in a fire or flood.”
I tried to put it to her in a way that would help her to understand the nature of priority to the items I was asking for to begin our move.
She diligently packed those things I asked of her so initially.
I had some idea of how big this move would be, but it was merely a sneaking suspicion as I look back, in retrospect.
Between vacating my 2-bedroom apartment space after 8 years in August 2025 and then moving my mother out of her 3-bedroom duplex in September 2025—the work involved was a personally inexplicable giant undertaking for me concerning both physical and emotional labor.
Three different truck rentals finally got the job complete as well as hours of sifting through endless pieces of my past from the years of my divorce with young children and the beginnings of being a single mother.
It has been only 7 months since this gargantuan shift in our lives first began—all without the physical presence of my artist father (who passed away from renal failure and complications of pneumonia four and a half years ago, now).
My artist father, William Mix, would not have been much physical help. He was frail and showing signs of dementia here and there for years before his final breath. However, when I worked alone at my mother’s rental during our move, I couldn’t help to feel… He was there. In spirit.
My mother’s old duplex rental where she lived for 14 years—and the last home my father new before passing away here in St. Augustine, Florida—is now newly on the market, by the way. Anyone care to purchase this property with such personal history connected to my story? If I could, I sure would… I have hardly begun to write of my memories spending days outside in the summer, there, with my children. I loved that location, so dearly.
As I had asked of her, my mother dutifully pulled all photographs and paperwork from her bedroom for me to place into storage. I handled the moving of all my father’s original oil paintings as well as “boxes upon boxes,” as I say often regarding the decades-worth collection left behind of my father’s drawings and studies. Those pieces are virtually countless—although I hope to be able to complete the count one day with the support of my subscribers, here.
So, weeks ago, suddenly sensing that vision of myself as a toddler with my face painted as a clown, I knew exactly what that memory was from.
I was so young, and I am very thankful photographs were taken.
I immediately asked my mother here at our new apartment if she knew where a picture like that was and if she had any pictures at all here not in storage to begin a motivated search.
I looked through a couple of bins that were more her family’s ancestry computer-printed photographs, but to no avail: any sort of match to the vision begging my mind’s eye to seek this photograph out more fully.
I knew I needed to pull very specific boxes from storage in order to track down what I was looking for.
I felt like I was on a “reconnaissance mission” to our storage unit.
It was a similar feeling to the recon mission I embarked upon the morning Hurricane Milton approached the west coast of Florida a couple of years ago; I had traveled last-minute to my mother’s duplex, pressed by loyalty and worry to move all my father’s original paintings still resting on floors and stacked against walls like files instead up onto beds in case of flooding—and also to intentionally rescue my father’s ashes.
I knew retrieving my father’s ashes was important a purpose and reason to venture out into such weather. I stopped to get a $5 rain poncho from the dollar store and travelled through the Milton’s initial rainbands 11 miles to complete my tasks.
My mission on the day of the hurricane and also this recent day I felt a pressing need to set to seek out our clown face-paint photo at our storage unit both felt so eerily similar… is because my father’s ashes are now at the climate-controlled storage unit… surrounded by all of his artwork.
I realize that sounds like a strange kind of limbo and location to keep his ashes for the time being, but I can’t think of a better place for his ashes to be right now except for to be surrounded by the breadth of his life’s work; my dream is to create a mausoleum for his artwork and for his ashes, too.
One day.
Being able to make priority the purchase of an urn for my father’s remains will come before that pipe dream of a mausoleum, however.
Thought our world indeed is churning and culminating both geopolitically and spiritually right now; I am holding tight onto this aforementioned plan and that hope about building a mausoleum.
All I really need is a plot of land and to start there. One day perhaps my sons or my father’s two other grandsons who are adults already, or their descendants, could build this mausoleum if I have already come to pass from this Earth—but I wish so much to make this happen, myself. Fingers crossed.
At the storage unit, I moved many, many bins out of the way to access containers of photographs I was hunting for.
They are up-cycled thick Styrofoam containers which frozen food deliveries had arrived in at my mom’s old duplex. These have a top piece of Styrofoam which create a mostly airtight environment inside and seemed perfect to move and store old photos during our huge shift.
As I finally moved one container, and then a second onto the long, flat storage unit dolly for transport the second one (being overfilled on the inside and very heavy) became unstable in my lifting and moving it.
The top came flying off.
Quite a few pictures were strewn upside-down on the floor outside of the 2nd-story unit.
One of the pictures which did land right-side up, however?
Low and behold: from just the collection I was seeking that day.
The picture was the one from my mind’s eye which had come to me so suddenly.
I brought all the photographs I could find at all in our storage unit home to our new apartment.
I have been swimming though seas and tide pools and eddies of old photographs (mostly taken by my father) for weeks. It has been such a journey.
I have been carefully scanning as many pertinent, useful shots as I can onto my computer hard drive to access and use in my memoir-writing.
I’ve found so many more pictures than I ever would have expected from exactly that day…
Here is where I am going to ask of you, my dear reader: to please stick with me and enjoy this piece until the end.
So often my storytelling does come to a distinct close and sometimes even a personal revelation to be shared or conveyed. It is true for this post even though I have no idea now how it will unfold in this “now” moment of stream-of-consciousness style writing.
I do plan to leave this post without any kind of paywall for all to see who wishes to read.
I would now like to share this core memory with you, my audience.
If you decide to stay and read this piece in its entirety, I feel a denouement of sorts (which only just unfolded for me in real time, last night). My reflections have yet to be written from here, but I feel this piece is so meaningful to my personal experience.
I believe my father brought me that vision—the one in my mind’s eye showing me a young me and him in clown face-paint.
I believe my father led me just last night to distinct synchronicity while prepping our current apartment for best/worst case scenario (as we are currently engaged in a very dangerous war-time conflict in the Middle East).
Four and a half years ago until now while making room and organizing new food stores and supplies in our pantry, I finally for the first time was called to pick up and be with a high quality, zippered reusable bag which has housed my father’s last personal effects since his passing. This is the same bag my mother packed for me to bring into the hospital for him as I took oversight about his care during that week, and then the bag returned with me home again from his inpatient hospice room after his death.
I open it and finally washed the clothes inside the bag. I decided to wipe down his wallet and look at its contents.
More on this in just a while. It is time to really dive into September 1984…
According to the journal kept during 1982 by my parents addressed to me as daily “postcards” from my first year of life, my mother transferred (as a business analyst with AT&T) from Pompano Beach where we lived after I was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We moved to Orlando as the year 1983 was about to begin.
I spent my toddler years of early childhood there with my parents at our 2nd family home together in south Orlando.
In September 1984 my parents took me to a place called Circus World.
Oh, that day was glorious!
My father rather enjoyed himself and it was a much different side of him compared to what I had known of him at home…
My father, the late artist William Jerry Mix (1943-2021) had done artwork depicting clowns and their inner world regardless of the mask they wore to please the crowd.
This place, Circus World, served to bring out the opposite of the status quo I usually recognized in him daily.
My father was in his element. He was a jovial, loving self I’d hardly known maybe until I saw him in his clown face.
Myself, however, at the prospect of having my face painted? Well, I was not ever keen on having face paint done to me as I can recall one specific instance from La Petite Academy preschool which I had attended during that time.
I could not bear the thought of any pigmented foreign substance applied near either my eyes or mouth.
In spite of my preferences and reservations about the make-up it was just too irresistible to jump in along with my father who was showing me more of his childlike personality than ever, before.
That day at Circus World was just so very different. I do not recall what the rest of our time there had entailed, but I do remember… It was one of the first times I felt really close with my artist father.
I remember even from before I could speak whenever my father looked away from his canvas and did look me in the face to placate my attempts for connection as an infant, he put on what I innately knew was a “phony” smile.
He was behaving in the moments during my infancy while home alone with me what he felt was required of him perhaps every few minutes in order to turn his attention back to his work—his craft of art.
Those were, of course, the days when I was at home with him during my first year and not being watched, instead, in a babysitter’s home for the day.
”Oh Coyyeen, oh Coyyeen,” he would say, pronouncing the double “L” in my name as a “Y” sound perhaps to make it more endearing to my ear and buy him more time with his brushes to canvas in the moment without having to look my way entirely.
That day at Circus World, however… My father had fully allowed me in to his world.
I didn’t need to ask. I didn’t need to beg of his attention. He just… let me in.
In a huge way to him, perhaps he was life imitating his own art that day, and art imitating his life.
To me… it was everything I had ever wanted and never knew I had been missing it. Likely, I had not understood until then what I had been missing or how much I needed that experience until I was in it.
Once we arrived back home from our time at Circus World I was still so euphoric. The euphoria wasn’t just from the park experience, itself, even with all that it amusements it had for us to enjoy. Instead, I truly did not want this dream with my father to end.
I absolutely and adamantly refused to let my clown make-up be removed at the end of that day.
I recall sitting on our front porch in protest, not wanting my time inside some corner of my father’s world to be coming to a close. I remember refusing a nap.
Eventually, though, the day won in all its glory over my little world, and I fell fast asleep on our living room floor.
So often I would do naptime on the floor with my favorite pillow to comfort me into dreams—but this day? It had to be dreams of what magic just had occurred in my young life.
Over this past weekend I made a trip with my younger son to our closest Costco.
I feel on high alert about what is happening in the global arena.
As a single mom whose teenage children now stay mostly with their father in order to be within just a few miles of their high school (an entire city south of where I have lived for 17 years) …I am deeply concerned.
As the daughter of an elderly, aging mother with major mobility issues, several comorbidities and in recovery from a stroke—I do worry what would happen if we needed to leave our apartment and flee for any pressing reason, given the geopolitical climate.
I came home from Costco with at least a 25lb bag of rice, several cases of bottled water and various, small stocks of non-perishable foods. I am attempting to create preparations for “bug-in” supplies if we were stranded at home for weeks without power or water.
I am using my last funds to prep, as my car has not been viable for work as usual for about the last 3 weeks. I have been living and supporting us here from my recent tax return funds. I am down to the last bit, but I feel strongly it is better to be prepared with supplies here at this particular time than none at all.
I also invested one last big chunk of my tax return in a 120-hr certification training course for an entirely different employment path. It will take some time to complete online, but I believe it is in my best interest to altogether stop driving rideshare for safety concerns.
My family needs me alive to protect them and to make sound decisions for us if push comes to shove.
As I was reorganizing our large pantry space and also pulling out various, miscellaneous items which just happened to land on pantry shelves from our move— looking for tools, batteries, small personal power station, etc… A recognizable black bag I had been avoiding for a very long time caught my eye.
The last time I opened this bag was to finally take out all of my father’s old prescription bottles of Gabapentin for neuropathy. The local police station had done a prescription drug take-back event some months ago and I felt called to make sure those full bottles were not just sitting around with no plans for years.
Otherwise, I had let that bag exist until now with William Mix’s personal effects inside: the shirt he wore into the hospital, a pair of men’s petite grey drawstring sweatpants, and a change of shirt/underclothes for if he were to come back home again. We did…expect him to come back home, again.
It was less than a week after being admitted to the hospital that he was accepted into inpatient hospice. He passed the evening after he was transferred to his hospice room.
So, deciding to finally care for his personal effects, I placed his outer clothes carefully into a wash cycle by themselves with no other clothes of ours to join them… purposely giving them space and respect.
I placed his fresh change of undergarments into the trash; he just won’t be needing those at all—and neither will I.
Also, his wallet was inside this reusable bag.
One might think I would have already examined the contents of his wallet. But no—I had not.
That wallet was only meant to be investigated further in that present moment which was my yesterday evening.
I believe it was his sign to me what I ultimately found there, inside his wallet.
The wallet is simple, plain brown leather.
It had needed to be wiped down of some residue which had seemingly protected it over these years. It reminds me now much like a thorny thatch of forest which might act as a first layer of protection for anyone venturing to discover an old, abandoned fairy-tale castle in the foggy twilight between day and evening.
I carefully opened each side of the billfold one leaf at a time as though it was, itself, a leather jacket my father was wearing right then and there, before me… taking care to clean the outside of this wallet before moving to the inside.
Once the object was wiped thoroughly clean of its residue I noticed a very old social security card (paper), and his most recent ID in the front and left card slots. Behind them, inside the billfold… was a stack of items I believe now my father had intended to be found…
The very first thing to meet my eyes upon this stack I dislodged from the billfold was a cut-out photo portion of one of my snapshots from Circus World made to fit inside a wallet-size plastic covering:
I had no idea he kept a photo of me—especially this one—as the main feature to be found and first meet my eyes from inside his wallet after his passing.
Had that day as Circus World meant as much to him as it did to me?
He knew how happy I was that day, I am sure of it—different than any other day before or after our time together.
He cared enough to keep this snapshot out of all of the many others of the same day to look at—even throughout the days of an entire year while he was homeless on the streets of downtown Orlando:
Adhered to the backside of the wallet-sized childhood Circus World snapshot my father is a picture of myself as an infant and my parents in a professionally captured photo:
The above picture would have been the product of what was noted and written in the daily journal documenting my first year. I approached 4 months old in the picture and also during this week with the specific date, April 14th, 1982:
I find it especially interesting to note what remarks were made on April 12th in this journal.
I know my father had a difficult time with an infant in his space as he attempted to continue his artwork as he would have preferred to do without me there to attend to. My mother had returned to work full-time February 8, 1982—just over a month after I was born.
Returning, now, to the further, more profound contents of my father’s wallet. For me, this becomes especially intriguing.
Next, I found a long, thin and rectangular piece of paper folded into four sections fit into his wallet-sized stack with a note written and continued onto its back side.
This paper seemed fairly new to the trappings inside his wallet and had no plastic covering for as well-kept it seemed compared to the other contents:
The above note seems like it may have come from his time in Flagler Hospital after his brain surgery in February of 2016.
I do not know what small picture “samples” he kept in his wallet ready to give out to whoever he thought might receive them well, but it seems this was the case and perhaps the note itself was either returned to him, or it was never successfully given in the first place… just waiting, instead, for the right time to pass it to his chosen receiver.
To me, this is a sign of One True Artist reaching out to the world from where usually he would stay reclusive inside his bedroom and home space for years and years at a time—until he had a medical emergency and was found to have two brain bleeds, one on each side of his brain that required being surgically drained.
Next, I found a miniature self-portrait kept protected in plastic comparable to the size of a wallet-size photo. What was written in red, on the back side of this paper is also below. Age 47. Kind of mind-blowing and a time warp. I, myself, am 44 years old now.
Lastly, and the most poignant find as One True Artist’s Daughter was very well-protected by plastic, strategically folded, and an artistically written quote from teachings of the Tao To Ching attributed by Laozi, often spelled in Western culture during the 1970s, “Laotzu.”
What have, we, here?
I did not mean to scan this paper into my computer file at a slant, but since this is the way it arrived onto my screen digitally, I decided to keep it this way. It might be art, in itself, and in its deep slant as I journey through documenting the contents of my late father’s wallet:
This quote is very meaningful to my father’s way as an artist, almost always giving away his works or donating them to organizations. Just… wow.
I am floored by the findings inside of my father’s wallet.
Even further than that… I am absolutely taken aback at the way in which I was drawn intuitively to partake of the journey to discover these artifacts.
The visual cognizance and consequential inner call to find the batch of photos of Circus World so suddenly.
The kinetic magnetism of how the very photo I was seeking fell out of it’s container face-up onto the floor at the storage unit.
The knowing I must write this story next, but somehow feeling a procrastination as though something hadn’t totally played out.
The fact that I had no plans to investigate the bag of his personal effects until I was partaking of my prepping, organizing and multi-tasking to ready our home space for either best- or worst-case scenario now that our country has begun a very high stakes war.
The sudden motivation to finally discover my father’s last personal effects years after his passing and during a time a great large-scale concern and careful preparation…
The synchronicity when I did carefully, respectfully and with great cleanliness open my father’s wallet, the first piece of his most personal belongings to meet my eye was that snapshot of me as a little girl at Circus World, which I had already planned to write about for weeks, now…
The photos of me as a child at Circus World I had found and scanned into my computer, already, just days before even considering to find and open his wallet…
I take it all cumulatively as a direct message from my father.
The message says to me in my father’s voice, “Yes! That’s right. You are on the right track. It is confirmed, you are doing what you are called to do, I see you, I approve, and I am with you every step of your way. Please stay safe. I adore you.”
I believe it. I hope so. I also know so. Thanks, Dad, for the guidance and for the gift of perseverance no matter what is happening in this world and during this era.
You weren’t ever one of the bad ones. Even though in my early years you so often hid your pain behind the smile of a clown… Deep down… You were always one of the true ones.
Thanks so much for being here with me while this post and writing finally, naturally unfolded beneath my fingertips here at my keyboard.
I hope and pray with all my might each of you stay safe in this current geopolitical climate.
I have to trust that we’ll all pull through this in the ways that we are meant to—the way it was written on each of our soul contracts to fulfill the agreements that we may very well have made before incarnating here onto planet Earth we may not even realize, yet.
I am motivated to lean into positive optimism while leaving a deep and wide place in my heart for empathy, love, care, concern, discernment, decision-making and of course, introspection as well reflection and expression.
We’re all just winging it, of course, but we must listen to intuition in whichever way it occurs to us.
We would be doing ourselves a disservice to completely ignore what surfaces for us each or any given day—whether it be emotion, the need for stillness, a draw into deeper connection with other humans, to help in whichever ways we can our neighbors or the strangers we meet, or just to create whatever it is we are enthusiastic to create every new day.
For me, for now—that is writing. Documenting. Becoming a “familial archeologist” with a special focus on my artist father’s life, his art, his philosophy, his psychology—and also my own.
William Jerry Mix deserves to have left his mark on this world and the era in which he lived at the very least for the amount of time and effort he put into his lifetime of artwork.
Also, so do I… deserve to leave my mark. I believe my output will transform in ways I cannot yet fathom, so long as I am blessed with time as we know it in this reality.
This Substack has proven to be wildly therapeutic in itself, so thank you very much to those of you who choose to read to the end of my words each time. I love your presence, and I love to share with you while I still can.
Don’t forget to keep coming back—and the best way I know to do that is to subscribe!
All the Love,
Colleen Noëlle
