My oldest sister, a nursing student, was home on a break, looked at me for ten seconds, and called the head of pediatrics at Oregon's Health Sciences University. That call saved my life. I was immediately transferred. Months later I was released from a group of loving people whom I had come to view as my family.
That hospital staff had posted twenty-four-hour volunteer duty with me as I was in intensive care alone. Residents reviewed their reports aloud. Students read their textbooks to me. Doctors and nurses read reports and children's stories. Doctors would poke their noses into my room and ask me to repeat what had just been announced over the loudspeaker. I did so, verbatim. This was more a developmental exercise for me than a neccessity for them. It certainly was foundational to the way I listened to words.
When I was placed in a normal room, I wondered, at first, who the civilians were who were not dressed in scrub green or white, but who visited me and seemed interested in my progress. I slowly sorted the details of my blood relationship to these guests. This experience would serve as a lifelong habit of choosing my own family, rather than simply accepting the bounds of family that blood dictates.
At the going away party, which the staff gave me, I was gifted with a yellow, soft, stuffed elephant. It was made of the same kind of looping of which bedspreads were made. Like overstuffed tatting. I don't know the word for the technique. Bedspreads of this sort are now considered antiques.
The elephant and I were inseparable. Yet in all the time I had it, I had no memory of its source, its beginning place. I had, in fact, no recollection of my time in the hospital at all until much later in my life, until the experience was fully informed by my older sister. The elephant had simply always been with me; it traveled with me, slept with me. I frequently ventured out of doors with that elephant, and it had its own place in my favorite tree. I would jam it under my shirt as I shimmied up the trunk and then place it on its perch where it could view the world along with me. In my memory, its name was the force of its comforting presence, and while I must have called it something, I do not remember giving it a name.
I knew none of the above hospital details until my oldest sister visited me for the fourth time in her life—the first being that visit of which I have just written, the second being my mother's funeral, the third being the visit to officially determine the level of dementia visited upon my father's mind by Alzheimer's disease, and the fourth being a few years ago. It was on that fourth visit that I thanked her for all the stories she read to me when I was a wee lass. I had, for decades, attributed my vocabulary and love of books to my oldest sister whom I recalled read to me incessantly when I was a toddler.
“No,” she confessed, “it was not me.” And then she spun the tale of my illness, my life hanging in a balance for months. The story captivated me, and suddenly made so many nonsensical things about me make sense (things like my precocious vocabulary, my love of new words, my habit of repeating phrases verbatim, and so on). It also disappointed me. How could I have gone through over forty years without anyone telling me such a significant thing about my own life? I asked her.
“I guess no one thought it was important that you should know” she answered. Ah, the odd bits of information families choose to keep from each other.
I don't recall taking my elephant to school, except maybe for show and tell. When I was in fourth grade, my brother left his electric blanket on, crumpled. An electric blanket on an unmade bed in a tinder box of a messy room. A room just across the hall from mine.
The house burned from the roof through to the structure of the second floor. Everything I owned—my art, my writings, all my origami paper brought to me from Japan by my third grade teacher, my clothes—burned. I wept only for one thing. The yellow elephant.
That summer was the only summer my father took me anywhere in the city. He bought a pass to the Portland Zoo. The pass came with a zoo key. The story would be more tidy if the color of the key was yellow. The key was red. Each display had a prerecorded message about the animals, their native habitat, their eating habits. One listened to these messages by inserting the zoo key. The red elephant. My father took me to the zoo a number of times that summer. He should have been sleeping, for he was a graveyard-shift manager at a heavy equipment manufacturing plant. Trying to object to my making a single dart to the elephant exhibit by asserting there were all kinds of things we could see—he finally succumbed.
My last visit might still be remembered to this day by the adults that were there. Packy was my favorite elephant, my favorite creature in this structure of fences and yards and pens. I'd participated in a contest to name him. My name, which I cannot recall, was not chosen. But still, Packy was my favorite.
I was aware of murmurs from the crowd around me. Only in retrospect do I know they were saying things such as, “It's like they're speaking to each other,” and “Look, that elephant is just staring right at that little girl.”
I reached my hands out over the rails, my little body splayed over the double metal railing, my dad holding on to my feet so that I would not go sliding down the cement cliff lining the elephants' area.
Packy raised himself up on this hind feet, his trunk seemed to fly in the air like a restrained bird. And he called to me. A resonant trumpet of a call. And then he thundered himself down and, to the amazement of everyone but me, Packy kneeled. His great, soft, leathery, tree-trunk-like legs bent, and that creature bowed to me.
I bowed back as well as I could manage. In much the same way it did not occur to me to think of my parents as old, it did not seem to me that this exchange was in any way odd.
The elephant rose, turned, and disappeared in the interior of the elephant's complex. My dad gently tugged my feet and slid me back over the bars and helped me to the ground. The crowd's tongues were murmuring. My father and I did not speak of it. Not then. Not ever.
“Let's go home, Sissy,” he said.
We never went back.
Live with Intention
After being in town a few short weeks, it seemed like Frankie had been in the community for a long time. As if she were exactly where she belonged. And she would tell anybody she was.
A mother who adored her grown children who had children of their own, she was ready for a different kind of life. A lighter life. Without so much “stuff” and only obligations that she would choose, even on a sunny day. This is the life she had created for herself in this small seaside community.
I enjoyed a connection with Frankie. While we were decades apart, we shared some fundamental views, among them, a commitment to the environment. When I started working on energy alternatives as a means to oppose oil leases off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, Frankie jumped right in. She loved that I was working to create solutions, not simply saying no to oil development off our coast. We worked together as volunteers for several years.
Frankie was a remarkable asset in any meeting. She listened attentively, and when she spoke it was to say the hard thing. She let other people say the easy things. She saved her voice for the truths that everyone knew but didn't have the nerve to say. Frankie was never short on nerve. When I'd thank her she'd brush it off and just say, “Ah, the truth is the truth. Some folks just have a hard time wrapping their lips around it.”
Not Frankie.
That is, not until the truth was about her health.
She started missing meetings, making commitments to activities and then not showing up. I called her because this was not her style and I was suspicious. She brushed off the concern saying she was just tired. I pressed her and continued to press until she finally went to the doctor.
In a playful but dreadfully dark way Frankie let me know she'd never be taking my advice again. If I hadn't forced her to see a doctor she'd be blissfully waking to happy days. But since I'd sent her into the arms of medical bad news, now she had six months, maybe, to live—and pancreatic