Elephants and Other Unexpected Gifts

The snow was the type you weren’t supposed to drive in, period. Especially not during the heaviest part of the storm, when white fluff was dumping at an astonishing rate. Meg was at the wheel, navigating in her minivan, which was the absolute worst type of vehicle to be in at this point. I listened to her chatter, looked over my shoulder at Beth, wondering why neither of my cousins seemed to be frightened beyond belief like I was. I was half-wishing I had gone with my father instead, safe inside his four-wheel drive SUV, confident in his winter-driving skills.

But. Meg, Beth and I were cousins, all the same age and raised together, born in a decidedly fertile year for our family. As adults, my cousins and I saw each other rarely—the occasional death seemed to be it. So I wanted every single second with them, even at the risk of crashing on a snowy back road.

We were on our way to the memorial service for our great-aunt, Libby. The title always seemed too long, so she was just Libby to us. Although she had died almost a year ago, the memorial had been postponed to allow southern family members time to coordinate travel plans. I’m not sure why we picked the dead of winter, but here everyone was, driving one behind the other on back roads while wet snow stuck, a chain-reaction pileup just waiting to happen.

“Remember the elephants?” Beth said, and it had been anyone’s guess who would bring that up first. The elephants and Libby went hand in hand, a simultaneous thought, one that couldn’t be born without the other coming into play.

Of course, we remembered the elephants. In attempt to keep my mind off the sliding van and Meg’s complete obliviousness to the treacherous roads, I elected myself to be the one to retell it.

It was Christmas 1988 or some such year. We were all gathered at my grandparents’ home, a place that seemed to have been the setting for Normal Rockwell’s inspiration. Little had changed since the 1960s, not in décor or progressiveness. It was as though time stood still at its most idyllic point. With the exception of the semi-new television and the rabbit eared Casio radio in the kitchen, everything else was a relic of the past. The mustard yellow corded phone, the sunken living room with brown patterned wallpaper. The camaraderie between my father and his family, me and my cousins, and Libby.

Libby was as eccentric as one could possibly be. Even as an adult—when I understood that her job as a museum curator indicated intellectuality, and her work as a Red Cross nurse during wartime indicated versatility, and her knowledge of countless subjects indicated that she was educated—even then, eccentricity was her stand-out quality.

On Christmas Day, she dressed in billowing satin clothing, rainbows of bright colors, gifts from her friend Amari in Africa, she told us. It was her standard holiday wear. She always wore Birkenstocks, long before they were trendy, and long after they were trendy. She kept her hair short, her lips hot-pink, and her fingers adorned in turquoise and silver jewelry. A mashup, she was.

Her home, a brownstone in New York City that she owned outright, was filled with objects that didn’t go together. It was a mashup just like Libby. Full of oriental rugs, first edition poetry books displayed on floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, ancient pottery with tiny chips inlaid with gold. Paintings worth more money than I can imagine and an abundance of plants suspended in macrame hangers. Her financial independence was a nod to a state of being that was yet to become vogue: a successful, single woman. No husband necessary.

As kids, we all sort of knew Libby was well-off and that’s where the elephants come in. Perhaps the most eccentric thing about Libby was her style of gift giving. Single, childless, and rich—she should have been the relative who indulged us with expensive gifts. Cash in envelopes, hard to score Cabbage Patch Dolls, or the brand-new, much coveted Nintendo system that was all the rage. Libby’s gifts, however, ran a different gamut.

One Christmas, it was eagle feathers for all of us! She had spent the year collecting them on walks and hikes in upstate New York, and she was just over the moon that she had enough to present one to each of us. Something to tie us all together, she said. We spent the day playing Davy Crockett and tickling each other under the chin, but it was a strange gift to eight year old girls.

Another year, she donated an extraordinary amount of money to MOMA, dividing the total by however many of us there were and giving us each a handwritten certificate stating that a donation had been made in our name. Gifts like this were usually accompanied by something small, a token to offset the disappointment in our little faces, I suppose. Her go-to was a coupon for a free Frosty from Wendy’s.

One year, my dad decided to best her. On a summer visit, she commented on the loveliness of our rose gardens, and demanded to know what kind of witchery my father was using to produce such succulent blooms, such deep color. He explained that the cow farm next door allowed him to fertilize his roses directly from their manure pile. Libby was beyond excited about this, imagining what cow poop could do for her little terrace garden. But there was no time that day for my father to take her on a field trip next door.

“I’ll wrap it up for Christmas,” my dad joked.

And when that Christmas came, he wore a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear as she opened the box and the read the note he’d attached to the bag. Ten pounds of cow manure, all hers. Quadruple bagged, though if you leaned into the box, you could still catch a faint whiff. Which of course we did, over and over.

“Yes!” she cried out, punching her fists in the air like a small child. She was beyond tickled that my father would go to the trouble to bag up manure for her, let alone present it as a Christmas gift. Meg, Beth and I rolled our eyes and plugged our noses. That year, we learned, Libby was just as weird of a gift recipient as she was giver.

Anyhow. The elephants.

The kicker was the year that she’d spent months abroad in Africa with Amari, who we secretly gossiped was her lesbian lover, after overhearing the adults whisper their own suspicions. They were doing some type of missionary work with poverty-stricken children that seemed unreal to us cousins, living our spoiled, sheltered lives. While there, she’d become invested in the preservation of African elephants. Their herd numbers were declining, poaching was a problem, and help was needed to protect them. Libby couldn’t save the children and the elephants with her own two hands. So she fed malnourished toddlers rice on spoons (so I imagined) and bankrolled the elephants

Through some program or other, she adopted three elephants. One for each of us—Meg, Beth, and me. Each year, she told us, she would continue to donate money towards the efforts to preserve the herds near the area that she and Amari had spent months living in bush-like conditions. In our names, of course. As we each opened our card, reading the handwritten notes to ourselves, I think we all felt a collective sense of disappointment. The three of us were nearly teenagers, so we smiled politely and said thank you. In her excitement about the three elephants, Libby had forgotten to include our standard Frosty coupon.

“She was so excited about those elephants,” Meg laughed. We listed the other various gifts: wooden African beads, sent to her by Amari one year. Season passes to the Bronx Zoo (that one was actually pretty cool.) Original hardback copies of Nancy Drew mystery books, long after they were age-appropriate for us. Eventually, after she entered Sunset Retirement Community and later, a nursing home, the gifts became recycled Christmas cards. Slipped inside would be a five dollar bill and a note encouraging us to spend it on something special, whatever special thing five dollars could possibly buy. The Frosty coupon seemed to go the way of our childhood and the elephants...in the past and forgotten about.

“You know, I missed getting those damn Frosty coupons,” Beth said. I looked back and smiled at her appreciatively. I knew exactly what she meant.

“Did you ever look up the elephants?” Meg asked, as she slid her van into the parking lot and I breathed a sigh of relief. Ironically, as Meg turned the van off, the snow stopped and the clouds began to reveal patches of blue behind them.

“No," I said. "Why, did you?"

“I did,” Meg said. “Did you know they’re still alive? Well, mine is anyhow. There’s a website. I’ll send you the link later. We'd better hurry.”

We hopped out of the van, following Meg and the throng that was trickling into the building, the rec center of Sunset Retirement Community, where Libby had spent a large portion of her retirement years. I couldn’t seem to get Meg's words out of my head. How many years ago had the elephants been? Had Libby’s money directly kept those three bad boys alive all this time? I had never, not once, thought to ask about or investigate saving African elephants. I glanced back at Beth, who seemed to read my mind. She was teary-eyed.

“Our elephants are alive! That just makes me…” She couldn’t find the word.

“I know,” I said.

Inside, we found ourselves surrounded by family. Not just our immediate family, but the extended family. Libby’s other nieces and nephews, second cousins we knew in name only, their children our age but complete strangers. Everyone smiled tentatively at one another. But there were more people than could possibly have fit on our family tree. I elbowed my dad.

“Who are all these people?”

He smiled. “Her friends.”

The memorial got underway quickly. One of Libby’s nephews thanked everyone for braving the snow, and explained that this was a day for us to remember Libby. No agenda, just an open forum in which anyone who wanted to speak about Libby was free to do so.

I looked around the room. I was in disbelief at the amassed crowd. My dad had said they were her friends, but these were people of all ages—some younger than I, some wrinkled and elderly in wheelchairs pushed by aides. There were quite a few people in scrubs. I expected that my dad would be the one to stand first and speak, but I was wrong. As I turned forward again, I realized a line was forming at the lectern. My dad was maybe tenth or eleventh.

I nudged Meg and Beth, each on one side of me.

“I don’t think we’ll have to speak,” Meg whispered, as awestruck as I was at the crowd and the line. "Just look!"

The first person at the microphone was an attractive man wearing scrubs. He introduced himself as Daniel, one of the nursing home employees. He was perhaps thirty, and I was shocked to see tears openly run down his face as he described what a joy, what an absolute light Libby had been in his life. He was unabashedly emotional as he spoke. At the end, he pulled something out of his pocket.

“She gave me this a few weeks before she passed. Just a polished rock from a souvenir shop, she told me, but it was still special.” He held his palm out, just enough that we could see the shiny jade-colored rock he cradled. He chuckled and then spoke again.

“She gave it to me because, she said, ‘it’s pretty and so are you’.” Daniel laughed and along with him, so did all of us. The next person at the microphone was one of my dad’s cousins, who spoke of summers spent with Libby in New York City when he was a troubled kid, an attempt by his parents to set him straight.

“There I was, fourteen and trying to score drugs and Libby thought the antidote was to take me to the museums and teach me about the Renaissance.” He shook his head, the second grown man in ten minutes to choke up.

“Well, she was right,” he said, quickly stepping down, his emotions all too much for the moment. I looked back and forth between Meg and Beth. We were all crying. Beth passed us a little packet of tissues.

Next, the head of Sunset. She spoke eloquently about Libby’s presence in the community. She talked about the monetary contributions Libby made each Christmas to the food pantry that the retirement community was involved with. She talked about how, on Christmas Eve, Libby snuck around like Santa Claus and left little coupons on each resident’s door.

“You know,” the woman said, “Those ones you get at fast food places? For free fries or a Frosty?”

Now Meg was laughing and crying at once. I reached out and clasped her hand in mine. There was no way I was going to be able to talk, nor were she and Beth. But this? Listening? Was a tonic for grief. Was a balm on the empty space left in each of our worlds. It felt like Libby was right there with us. Probably watching all of us with her hands clasped together, her mouth open in sheer delight.

My father’s words of his Aunt Libby began with a story from childhood, when Libby was the only adult who went sledding with them, no matter how wet and cold it was. Who taught them how to lay low and gain speed on their wooden sleds with metal runners. Who was there at every Christmas, with her silly and weird and wonderful gifts in hand.

“I guess we all know what Libby’s gifts were like,” my father acknowledged, and the crowd collectively laughed. He wiped his own tears—my father!—and shook his head.

“How lucky was I,” he said, “that she was my very own aunt.”

On and on it went. The friends from the retirement community—too many to count. Employees of Sunset. Neighbors from the New York City days. The final woman to speak was Lucy, the daughter of Libby’s cleaning lady in New York City, who was the recipient of her numerous fur coats when Libby finally sold the brownstone to move to Sunset.

“My mother and my sisters and I had so little, we really struggled. Libby always wildly over tipped my mom, and then, when she left, we had the fur coats!” Lucy said. "She had no way of knowing, or maybe she did, that my mother didn't have enough money for winter coats that year."

It was not lost on me that while I, a privileged child in suburban America, received only coupons and feathers, this young lady's family was the one to get the fur coats. Their worth was accentuated in warmth over monetary value.

In fact, it seemed, for all the money she had, she only invested in things that really needed it. Supporting the arts. Food pantries and hungry children. Elephants in danger.

After Lucy stepped down, Libby’s nephew instructed us to move to the next room, where there were light refreshments for us all. We began to shuffle out, the hum of the crowd rising, tears dissipating and replaced by laughter.

In the room next door, in a large, glass-paned stand-up freezer, a man reached in and out offering everyone one of the dozens of child-sized Frosties from Wendy’s. Ice cream in a snowstorm in the rec center of a retirement village, a hundred people gathered together for Libby.

It was perfect.

People began to mingle outside of their collective circles. I wanted to talk to Lucy, to tell her I remembered meeting her once, when I was visiting Libby, and Lucy's mother brought her along to clean. I wanted to see if she could recall playing with me on Libby’s terrace, pretending we were in a jungle amongst all the growing plants.

As I looked for her, I saw that others seemed to be doing the same. My dad was shaking hands with the head of the retirement community. Daniel and Meg were laughing over the stone, which Daniel was showing her. Meg, no doubt, would tell him about the elephants. Old people, young people, relatives, friends, employees—every single one of us, connected only by Libby.

Each of us at one time or another a recipient of a gift from Libby—more than once, if we were lucky, like my dad said.

As I watched the connections being made and ate my Frosty, I realized this was the gift--this was the ultimate gift. I could not imagine anything that would have delighted Libby as much—not saving the elephants, not cow poop, not eagle feathers or shiny stones or collectible books. This. The people of her life together, right here.

The culmination of her existence in terms of love. This, along with Frosties, was her final gift to us. And what a gift it was.

Tossing my paper cup, I reached into my purse as I scanned the room. I felt my fingers touch the African beads I had long since taken to carrying, letting them serve as a worry stones. I rubbed them while searching the crowd for Lucy.

I wondered if she had worn one of Libby's furs today. I hoped she had.