Tuesday, November 1, 2011

An Elephant Healed Me

There was a time in America when a disenchanted young boy would threaten to run away from home and join the circus. Moses Lentz actually did that. He is now unraveling a lifetime of memories and memorabilia, and reweaving them into a semi-autobiographical story.

Says Lentz: "It all begins when as a ten year old boy. Michael is on his way to an orphanage. Accompanied by caseworker on the trip he has a fear of what will become of him. Once there, although skeptical, he soon finds out that things are much better than he had imagined them to be. His experiences at the orphanage are interwoven with memories associated with the past before he was sent to the orphanage. Eventually Michael decides to run away and ends up hopping on a freight train where he meets a one legged man with a bulldog named Pete. Little does he know that the chance meeting will change his life forever. With no real plan in place he follows the stranger to a circus where he finds work and a place to start his own life. Throughout the experiences in the Circus there are many more references to his earlier life. He eventually ends up wandering through the hobo camps and finding work with the gypsy 'travelers'. This chapter of his life is wrought with hard experiences that he has had to learn but the lessons serve him well and he finds work in the Carnivals and in places like the French Quarter in New Orleans. It is a variance of many things that seem to weave in and out of Michael's life that carries him from one end of the country to the other with a rich mixture of experiences and interesting people who contribute to his growth."

The book-in-progress is called An Elephant Healed Me.

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