An Elephant to Remember

Last Saturday, I was honored to have my For the Love of Vietnam book release party at the lovely new arts studio, Barn Alley Arts, in Round Lake, N.Y.

After the reading, someone asked which of my memories of Vietnam was my favorite, and I was stumped. I stumblingly said it was enjoying the swimming pool that we’d made out of the fish pond in the middle of our house, which was true enough.

Pool Party!

The thing is, I’ve never thought of my palette of memories that way—as a chorus of singers, one of whose sounds sent the most pleasure rippling through my psyche.

This is not because my memories there are so traumatically painful, it’s just that the memories I have are like glimpses of light and shadow in the shards of broken mirrors. They are splinters of moments, shades of emotion that I’ve fashioned into narrative pieces through long, dogged effort.

Enter the elephant. A couple of days before the event, my friend and Barn Alley Arts proprietor Janet Patenaude told me she was taking a long car ride to get a very small present for me, a belated birthday gift.

It turned out to be this small elephant.

I was delighted.

She said that she’d remembered a photo I’d posted of my father with an elephant on a Saigon Street. My sister Marina shared that photo with me with great delight. I didn’t, at the time she’d sent it, have the heart to tell her that our dad actually hated the things, as evinced in this passage from this March 1974 letter to his sister, Jean:

I was at first enthusiastic about sending artifacts to [nephew] Mike to sell as samples but . . . Breakage is the thing. A broken elephant is no good to anyone. But I have heard that they are selling for $175 on the East Coast.

I will send you one just to sit in the living room if you want one of the damn things—personally, I think they are abominable!

But most other people seem to like them and I have one in my living room because Nancy took a fancy to it when she was down here last time.

The elephant in the living room.

When my sister said she was thinking about selling the elephant as part of her “Swedish death-cleaning” effort, I felt a sudden longing to hold onto the past and said as much.

“But it’s 40 pounds,” Marina said. “It would cost a fortune to ship.”

The freight cost is prohibitive and as my dad said 50 years ago, breakage is the thing.

But to think, that elephant statue stood sentinel for much of my childhood, it traveled (via container) from Saigon to Virginia to Hawaii. It was part of the family from 1974 to 2004.

If only it could talk, what would it remember?

Probably more than I do.

Janet had somehow anticipated my nostalgia and had traveled far out of her way to get an elephant that was “my size.”

Unlike my dad, I don’t need to worry about hefting it into the trunk of a car, or fret about shipping it, or that it might break in transit.

The tiny elephant has become an instant favorite for me. It’s compact and new to me and yet already imbued with long meaning.

Seeing it helps me to remember that “Stories of Vietnam” are not all about the distant past, about sharp-edged memories, but about the connections we make today, the stories we share in new spaces, about unforeseen possibilities that might expand our horizons and offer delight in our ever-shifting world.

It is an elephant I hope never to forget.