My 102 Year Old Volunteer

"Dad, please, no!" — Issue 129

Rick Lewis archives

I made my living for a decade as a street performer. I made my monthly rent and paid for all my food and essentials with money donated directly into my hat following live shows at Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver, BC.

One day I’d built a very large crowd with my juggling routines and was preparing for my big finale, the riding of a 12-foot-high unicycle. Getting on the apparatus required four audience members to hold the pole, and another four on each side to assist my brief tightrope walk to reach the seat.

The trick was gathering a large enough crowd in the first half of the show so that finding volunteers to assist with the last stunt was easy, because I’d established trust and momentum with the audience.

The first row of the audience in the open air theater space sat on a thick wooden bench made of railroad ties that separated the performance area from the spectators.

Additional crowd members would stand behind, sometimes ten rows deep by the end of the show. To get a volunteer to the stage, I had to convince them to step over that first row of hefty benches that were bolted to the ground.

Rick Lewis archives

On this day, I had in place almost all of my support team for the big finish.

I tried to bring one final helper who was standing directly behind one of these benches to the stage — but he resisted.

He had a great excuse.

Pointing to the elderly gentleman standing next to him, he explained that he couldn’t leave his dad alone in the crowd.

As it turned out, it was his dad’s birthday. And when I found out his father had just turned 102 I announced it to the audience and invited hundreds of people to sing happy birthday to him there in the open courtyard.

That alone was a lifetime memory in my days as a street performer.

I turned away to find my last volunteer elsewhere in the crowd so I could carry on with the show.

But as I walked away from the father and son, I heard the son say,

“Dad, please — no!”

Turning back to look at them I could see that the 102-year-old dad was attempting to climb over the bench.

The son was trying to talk his father out of it, but apparently the centenarian wasn’t buying his son’s excuse for not participating in the show. And he was going to show him how it was done.

You don’t move very fast at 102, but he didn’t have to, because every member of the crowd was patiently riveted to his efforts.

Among the hundreds of spectators who sang happy birthday to the man who was now determined to be my last volunteer on stage, not one person got bored, distracted, or wandered away over the several hushed minutes it took for this shining elder to nudge, grunt, and inch his way to the front — swatting away the “help” of his son as he went.

It’s been said that our modern attention span has been reduced to that of goldfish, but the real truth is that we’re not interested in the uninspiring impressions we’re bombarded with. We’re interested in things that are human and real. And there was nothing feeble whatsoever about the spirit or the fire of determination and mischief in the sparkling eyes of this man who shuffled his way into a place holding the end of one of the ropes that stabilized the unicycle. Granted, he wasn’t exactly a powerhouse of physical support, but as a mascot he motivated a double-output of strength from the rest of the volunteers.

With that support, I climbed to the top of the unicycle.

Every once in a while, someone punches a hole in the wall of consensus reality and opens up a view of what is possible, right here and right now in human life — beyond fear, reasons, and our excuses for holding back.

Despite the fact that my head was 15-feet in the air for this finale — designed to be the most compelling, visible and captivating spectacle within sight — all eyes were elsewhere.

They were focused on this one authentic, courageous human who was teaching his son and the rest of us what it looks like to live in full.

I’ve never been so happily upstaged in my life.