The elephant in the alley


The first time I saw the toy elephant was a month ago. It was lying on its side in a patch of grass and leaves and twigs in the alley behind our house. That seemed wrong.  I put the plastic creature on its feet. Every morning walking to the bus, every evening coming back from the bus I glanced down to make sure it was still there. And until yesterday, it was.

Yesterday when I came home there it was—in 34 pieces. Run over by a car? Smashed to pieces by someone's boot? What happened?



I bent down and carefully picked up the shards and then carried them in a cupped hand into the house. There was never any question that I would glue the pieces back into some kind of form. I laid them out on a paper towel. Shelagh is in Minneapolis.



I bought three tubes of Krazy Glue. (As I write this blog post there is still a distinct elephant glue aroma in the room.) I looked at the pieces until they began to resolve themselves into head, body and legs. The I re-constructed the miniature creature, hind legs first, then part of the back, then right ear and face, and then the belly and front legs and then the left part of the head. It was oddly satisfying to see the elephant begin to reacquire its form.



In the process of applying pressure to the shattered parts until the adhesive could do its bonding work, I quite effectively glued my finger tips to the elephant's hide. Three times. This was not as thrilling. Any of the three times.

After work today, I finished the repairs. There is a still a massive hole on the left part of the toy elephant's body, and there are blobs of dried glue on its face, but it again bears some resemblance to its former shape.



Now I have time to wonder what this was all about.

Maybe it was instinctual. We just don't leave bodies lying in the road. A kind of Antigone in Parkview.

Maybe I recalled how Shelagh and I sat in a bar a couple of weeks ago, and, with audio down, watched The Nature of Things on the TV above the bottles. The episode told the story of those in Kenya who care for elephants. I now know I can watch, while nursing a Village Blacksmith, mediated elephants move back and forth on a monitor for a full hour. This is actually useful self-knowledge.



Maybe I remembered reading Babar Loses His Crown as a boy.

Maybe I sensed that this toy once belonged to a boy or girl who is now grown up, and that the plastic elephant was once a trusted companion.

Maybe it's hard to see some things in pieces.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more