and shards of insight into the flames. In an instant the tower of heat was reduced to a molten coal. Intention and Chaos grabbed the cradle and deftly slipped it under the newly compressed ball of fire. Then they swung the crib back and forth while the others stood in a circle. Following a familiar form they sang their ageless invitation. Soon they heard from the other side of the world.
“It's a girl, Mrs. Radmacher. Does she have a name?”
“Yes, her father and I will name her Mary Anne.”
I was oblivious to the inquiry until second grade.
“No! They are my parents, not my grandparents.” I was certainly used to them as my parents. The last of my grandparents had died when I was five, and I did not come to understand grief in regard to my grandfather's passing. Only relief. He was described by the nonreligious members of my family as some kind of “crazy bastard.” Perhaps even the religious family members found it within their experience to levy the same charge against him.
My curiosity pushed beyond its civil limit, I finally asked, “Why? Why do you think they are my grandparents?”
The answer was apparent to all but me. “They are so old.”
So old. So old. It was true. Amorous in their anticipation . . . I was the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration to Hawaii that my parents never took. Oddly, I think my mother never really forgave my birth for cheating her of what would have been her first time out of the Pacific Northwest. At least she chose to have me. She was receiving endless unsolicited advice to have me aborted for the sake of her health. She was forty-four. She had a history of miscarriages. Both of my parents insisted that when they married they wanted five children. I would make the fifth, if I survived.
And I did. Against a host of odds. My mother's general health was challenged, and the two packs of cigarettes she smoked each day became a challenge for me. It was mitigated, somewhat, by the two glasses of scotch on the rocks she would imbibe before five. . . .
Oh, what we didn't know then—in 1957—about fetal health and the life-time effects of smoking and drinking while pregnant.
The nine-month lounge act I enjoyed in my mother's belly introduced me to a world bronchially challenged from the word go. At nineteen months old I had a menu of illness offerings: scarlet fever, pneumonia, this and that—the list eludes my accurate memory. Poor care added staph infection to the masterpiece of illness, like a malicious single stroke of red across the painting.
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
