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At a big car show on a sunny Saturday in August in a tree-shaded park beside a little lake in Galloway County, Wisconsin, a seventy-year-old man and his wife and his dad and his somewhat younger cousin were running somewhat low on steam and were heading out of the park, when a woman who looked somewhat familiar to the seventy-year-old man and not apparently with any companions at the moment, approached them and warmly greeted the man and his wife, but the seventy-year-old man was not sure exactly who this greeter might be, and, receiving no cue from his wife, he said to the greeter, “Please forgive my having to ask, but are you —?” And yes, she was.
This disturbed the seventy-year-old man, that he had not really recognized this woman with whom, he now recalled, he had attended high school in the village of Fjord some fifty-five years ago and whom he had conversed with from time to time over the years, and, though the greeter no longer lived in Fjord, the man and his wife had in fact chitchatted with her on the occasion of a schoolmate’s funeral just eleven months before that August car show. He should have known her, yes, should have recognized her, he thought. He was puzzled and disturbed.
Then, as the greeter exchanged pleasantries with the man’s wife and his father and his cousin, the seventy-year-old man had a further thought, and he asked, “Is your hair different than when, um, than it was when we last saw you?”
The greeter replied with a chuckle. “Maybe,” she said. Maybe I have more gray.” She touched her hair, as she said this, and this, too, puzzled the man. Did she mean, “Time marches on,” or perhaps did she mean, “Yes, my hair has changed; I used to color it, but now I have let it go.”
The greeter continued to talk to the wife, the dad, and the cousin, while the seventy-year-old man continued to think about these things, and then he noticed something else that he would have to think about some more: the greeter’s blouse was lavished with elephants! Lots and lots of little, lovely, blue, all-alike elephants in profile, each about maybe an inch-and-a-quarter in height and width, many, many, many elephants, marching sort of trunk-to-tail in an innocent pleasant pattern on the greeter’s white, bright blouse. What an out-of-the-ordinary choice of attire, the seventy-year-old man thought. Possibly the blouse was from Thailand, he thought. He wanted so badly to ask, “Do you mind telling us, is your parade of pachyderms purely ornamental, or are you, as I fear, proclaiming in this park a partisan political preference?” Those two possibilities were the only two he thought.
He wanted to ask, but the man was hesitating. He felt, the consequence of mentioning elephants could very well be devastating.
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