10/11/12: A cross-stitch pattern...

...several large templates for making your own crossword puzzles, a stuffed elephant.

The elephant is a very cartoon-like stuffed animal, with poochy jowls and tiny tusks.  Maybe a little like the elephants in Disney's The Jungle Book.

I saw that movie when it first came out.  I was eight years old (which would make the year 1969), and it was maybe the third or fourth movie I'd seen in my life.  We went because my mother had flown back to Oregon from Massachusetts to help her mother care for her stepfather, who'd just had heart by-pass surgery.  She was gone for two weeks, which felt like an eternity to all of us.  I don't think she'd been away from me for so long except when my two younger siblings had been born.  (Come to think of it, a movie was involved with one of those mother-absences, too.  We lived in Sweden when my sister, Kjerstin, was born.  It was 1966, and my dad took us kids to see The Sound of Music in Stockholm.  That was my first ever movie.)  My dad, I think, felt badly for all of us when we were bereft of my mother, and he was prone to do especially nice things when she was absent - to help us all feel better.  I hope it helped him.  It certainly was an interesting distraction for me.

And then there's elephants.  I have a Thing about them.  I can't think of an animal less suited to being made into a goofy stuffed animal.  They symbolize for me the Wild Otherness of creatures.  When I was nine, we went with our beloved friends, Tom and Kathy, and saw the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus in Madison Square Garden.  The drill in those days was to first go behind the big top and see all the animals that would later dazzle us with their feats and costumes.  Seeing elephants in shackles had a wrong-ness to it that leveled me. 

I want to pay more attention to those moments when they happen.  There is something good about knowing what strikes us deeply.