The glass elephant

      The glass elephant was in my mother's purse when she died, one year ago today. 
      She'd had it most of her life — taken it to Europe with her when she went to entertain the troops, at 16, as a good luck token. I should have asked her the story of how she got it. It's two and a half inches long, pressed glass, cheap. Something won at a carnival in the early 1950s, perhaps. So let's say a boy won it for her or ... reflecting current sensibilities ... that she won it herself. Though frankly, I prefer the won-it-for-her version.
     She lent it to my father as he circled the world as a government scientist. Europe. Africa. Asia. Australia. Carrying the elephant guaranteed safe return. Nobody ever lost it. 
      My brother got to the hospital first, and ended up with the purse, and the elephant. Less sentimental than myself, he didn't want anything of hers. When we cleaned out her room at the dynamic senior living facility in Addison, we divided her effects between things to throw away, and things I was keeping. I envied him his strength. I'll throw it all away too, eventually. Or someone will. But not now.
     I let six or nine months go by — and how quickly time seems to pass, while crawling — then did ask  him for the elephant. At one of our regular lunches he delivered it. Though I was almost sorry I had. Back home, regarding it, I felt a deep pang, almost a shock, as truly sad about her passing as I ever was, because I realized, in that moment, that its locus of significance rested with me and me alone. Nobody else would ever know, or care. Like the glass trinket, her entire world, really, rested in the palm of my hand or, rather, some clump of neurons nestled somewhere in my head. Talk about a fragile weight, a glass elephant. Someday, it would be gone, and before then, I, or someone, would release this glass animal into the slipstream of life, and it would rush away to be, at best, treasured by someone who appreciated its  ... 
     I plugged the picture above into Google Image Search and — to my surprise — learned it is an L.E. Smith pressed glass elephant, made by a Pennsylvania glass company. Twelve dollars and twenty-five cents on eBay and it's yours. We have so much knowledge now.
     Not that it would be her glass elephant, which I added to a little menagerie of her elephants  set up on a shelf in my office. She collected them or, rather, expressed a fondness for this one, and elephants became our father's go-to gift. I moved the group to a better spot, to take a picture, and realized that one member of the herd was missing, a fine green stone elephant that my father bought in South Africa. I hunted for it longer than I should — so much crap in my office — trying to tamp down the almost frantic urgency by thinking of something she used to say when we'd lost things as children: "You'll find it when you're not looking for it."
     That never quite worked — I remember being more annoyed than anything else. And it didn't work very well now, as I hunted around in places I'd already looked. Finally I went off to do other things and, distracted, found some critical distance, and moved on. It occurred to me that I was frantically trying to keep my world together a little longer, in face of the great scattering sure to come. In the end, one less elephant might even be a good thing. Though I still hope to find it. When I'm not looking for it. My mother was a smart woman, in many ways.