You Can Lead an Elephant to Water

...But apparently not without a dram of whiskey.

I haven't exactly finished Water for Elephants yet, but I'm having a real need to talk about it as I reach the home stretch. Now, this is not a book you would have recommended to me back when. However, it is a fantastic book and one that I've been meaning to read for over a year.

You'd be proud of me: that's another one of my resolutions this year, Mrs. B -- getting through that "to be read" pile.

Anyway, as I said, this is not exactly a book you would have offered me way back when (probably not one you would have had on reachable shelves at the library either) because of adult themes and language, but, that said, it's been a thoroughly enjoyable read. And, I have a feeling, a book you'd also enjoy. And one of the AMAZING things I've heard about this book (I'm not sure that it's true or not) about this book, one of the things that warms the cockles of my heart and gives me hope is that it's a NANO book. Someone actually this book during a National Novel Writing Month event. Just how cool is that??

Today, though, I have to admit, it made me feel a little guilty. Perhaps I'm reading too far into this book, but as the book bounces between the historical and the present (and I'm going to try to avoid saying too much because I'm afraid of spoilers, because this is a good book and I really do think you should read it), I feel guilty about my own elders in my life and the situations they are in and the stories that they haven't necessarily told me.

Now, if you've already seen the movie, I understand that you might be telling me "Woah, now. Wait a minute, Angle. What do you mean the treatment of elders?"

Well, I've heard that they cut out all the interactions in the old folks home for the movie. After all, people go to movies for a good love story, a good cry, and to feel better about themselves and their world having had it affirmed by what they've seen on the screen, right? (Oh, don't get me started on this theme. Or the movie Sucker Punch. Just saying.) Unless it's a Nicholas Sparks book-gone-to-Hollywood. But I've digressed.

Actually, I think that the most important theme - more than the love story - is this idea that recurs throughout the story about how we care for others and how it reflects in what happens to us. Or what it says about us. Jacob feels like he's been abandoned by his family at the Home. And at one point in the story, it really does sound like he is when they don't show up when they would normally have "because of other commitments." In the past, though, Jacob has made it part of the little family he creates in the circus, taking care of others: Camel, Rosie, Walter, and Marlena. He does his best to protect others. To care for Camel when he's sick, to care for Rosie, to protect her and Marlena from harm, even at risk to himself. In fact, the very nature of this past story that no one at the home knows about, this story (or parts of it anyway) that at the beginning he says he's never told anyone -- not his family, not his children, and certainly not the caretakers at his residence that just treat his outbursts like a mental illness --brings home to me a real, deep hurt. Discomfort. Empathy. I cried reading part of this on my way in to work this morning, a scene where it should have been the culmination of something Jacob's been looking forward to and instead is let down by his family.

More so now than ever, for two very big reasons:

I lost Grandma recently. I don't know if you'd ever met her, but, she was a wonderful lady. Always full of stories and jokes (most of them shouldn't be shared in public, even in her slightly skewed versions).

My step-dad has Alzheimer's. I remember when the stories he told started to lose sense. He always seemed to be such a sharp guy, and to see him now, really breaks my heart.

They have both been these figures in my life that I had taken for granted, whether it be their stories and their presence. I know no one lasts for ever. And we have to listen while we can. But, I can't help but ask myself whether or not I've really listened. Whether or not I've listened enough. Is there an "enough?" What stories didn't I hear from Grandma about her life and her family? What were the stories am I hearing from my step-dad now before they were fractured with his thoughts. I don't know. I feel like there were questions I never knew to ask both of them, histories I never learned and now, never will. And even though I know it's, in part, a work of fiction, there really is a ring of truth in Jacob's perspective.

I think you told me once, after you gave me that book (I have the worst time remembering the name of it), that the best books are the ones that hold the most truth. That it doesn't matter what the genre is, just as long as some part of it speaks to you in your soul at some level, that you connect and identify with it, that those are the best books.

And you were right. They are.

While I don't have the elephant's memory for book names -- or much else for that matter -- I do remember when something I read touches me deeply and those tend to be the books I run out and say "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS!"

So, Mrs. B., you have to read this book.

Yours,

Angle

*****

P.S.: I finished this book last night just after writing this post. Wow. I just gotta say wow. Go Jacob.

Ms. Gruen, wherever she may be, is one fantastic writer. Hats off.

-OA-