On Eating Elephants When I was younger, I compared my grandfather to that of an elephant, 13 feet tall, 15,400 pounds, and a heart weighing up to 46 pounds. A big, broad, vulnerable creature, towering over the rest of the family. Ten months of hairy cell leukemia, a rare strand of the already rare strand of chronic lymphotic leukemia claiming his body made him so small, just skin and bones.
My best friend sat 205 miles away over Skype and asked: “How do you get rid of an elephant in a room? I imagined an elephant squeezing itself like a balloon into my nine-foot-tall living room. “You have to eat it,” she said, “Do you know how eat an elephant? One bite at a time. ” . The phrase: “When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time,” was first spoken by the former US Army chief of staff, Creighton William Abrams, Jr. This was a man famous for aggressive and effective tactics as a tank commander in World War II. During the war, his battalion was also the first to break through lines to the 101st Airbourne at the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne, Belgium.
He was in control over all forces in Vietnam in the Vietnam War’s later years, and he held the office of chief of staff until he died. I could not find exactly when he used this quote, only that he said it. Perhaps it was visible as well as audible, steaming from his lips like fog in the winter chill, missing home on Christmas Day as he fought toward Bastogne. Perhaps it was mumbled during the tragedy of the Vietnam War, spoken only loudly enough for someone to hear, jot down, and share so that it may find us, here, in 2015.
Or perhaps it was said unheroically, before he knew how honorable a man he would be, as he strived for success as the military academy at West Point. Abrams died of cancer in 1974 and was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. There was a picture book I read as a child full of jokes told by a character called Fozzie the Bear. I would to sit in my grandparent’s living room on their blue couch and read as my grandmother handed me a sandwich and told me to keep my feet off of the furniture.
One of Fozzie Bear’s jokes was about knowing there was an elephant in your fridge by the footprints in the butter. Imagine an elephant entree in the refrigerator, Saran-wrapped on a paper plate — grilled elephant breast or elephant sandwich, waiting on the small shelves next to the margarine. One of Betty Crocker’s cookbooks — “the new edition of the big red cookbook” — has pages with pictures of the various cuts of cows, pigs, and lambs. Imagine a page of elephant cuts: the elephant chuck, leg cutlets, and the two knee joints.
Recipes of broiled or herb-crusted elephant meat, sweet and savory ribs, or elephant stew. The females are called cows, after all. Elephant foot is said to be the utmost delicacy in some African cultures, and some Asian cultures believe that eating the reproductive organs can improve sexual skills. In prehistoric times, men hunted the elephant-like mammal, the mastodon, and they chased mammoths across the country. In the last few centuries, occasional explorers would receive the delicacy of elephant foot from African tribes. They would prepare the choice, white meat, typically by boiling it.
To prevent sunburns and bugs, elephants douse themselves with protective layers of dust and sand, and they walk hundreds of miles to satisfy their daily needs for food. Yet the dish of elephant foot is served as a delicacy in some cultures. In 1790, the explorer Francois Le Vaillant found his breakfast of elephant food delicious. Paul du Chaillu, in 1859, thought the meal was tasteless and dry, though he explained that the foot was the best piece. Dr. David Livingstone ate elephant foot porridge. An elephant foot alone could feed 50 men, and an entire elephant could feed 200 people for over a month.
There lies the solution to world hunger. There also lies a daunting problem for me to stomach — roughly 10,000 pounds taken one bite at a time. I wear an elephant pendant around my neck daily. It seems to trumpet its existence to the world for all of the notice it’s gotten. The small innocent sterling elephant’s foot crushed into my ribcage reminded me of the animals recognized strength and compassion misused as an executioner in the 19th century, crushing prisoners in India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand under its weight.
They say when elephants grieve, they stroke the bones and lay leaves over the body to cover it. The cemetery my grandfather was buried in resembled the ones at Arlington — small, uniform gravestones lined in perfect rows. It is rumored that the caskets in the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery are buried vertically, though my father swears he saw them place the casket horizontally, my boyfriend swears he saw it go down vertically, and the rest of us somehow missed the actual lowering of the coffin.
I wondered if the term “six feet under” applied to vertically-buried caskets: is it still considered six-feetunder when your grandfather is 6’2″ and buried vertically in a casket? My grandfather is one of 41,102 people buried at the cemetery, a veteran of the Air Force, with a burial complete with military honors. There is the twenty-one gun salute, the playing of Taps on the trumpet, and an American flag draped over the casket, then folded 13 times and placed in the hands of my grandmother, who cannon possibly swallow this bite.
