ATTICS AND ELEPHANTS
A
boy at the zoo peering
through
the bars hears someone say,
the bars hears someone say,
elephants never forget anything, and so
my
father’s fascination begins…
and the family follows suite
with books about Barbar,
with books about Barbar,
and later with the stuffed animals,
one
then many, a
posse of pachyderms
all dressed as cowboys amassing
in a boy's bedroom, until
the collection eventually is out grown
and
relegated to the attic
and
is forgotten,
and
then forgotten again
when
the house, decades later,
is
sold with the elephants in it,
and
then one day, years after the sale,
my
father, a man in his fifties, remembers,
I left them there,
when we emptied out the house.
How could I have
forgotten them?
which is a detail that was never included
in any telling of the story I was told
of
how and why the house got sold
and
the grief that came with it,
not
until more decades had passed,
not
until I was a man in my fifties,
and was hearing once again
the
story of how my father had to sell
his
father’s house because he was
too
sick to stay there,
only then, in that telling,
that time, for the first,
were the attic and
the elephants
added, who knows why
they were there then
and weren’t before,
and weren’t before,
maybe
it was because death and dying
and
the prospect of emptying out
another house was on everybody’s mind,
another house was on everybody’s mind,
but
the attic and the elephants
were there, were finally in the story,
like
the baby buggy found in the attic
was there and was a part of
the house
my parents bought in Oregon
when they bought it
twenty-odd years ago,
and maybe, because houses have attics
my parents bought in Oregon
when they bought it
twenty-odd years ago,
and maybe, because houses have attics
and are often full of hidden treasures, maybe
because of this and so many other things,
I
am now thinking
elephants don’t forget,
but humans do,
which
has me wondering,
what
else has my father forgotten
to
tell me, what else
about
his life
have
I forgotten
to
ask about.
