Grandmother's Elephant

      More Letters From Paradise
       Grandmother's Elephant
This is my attempt to re-create a conversation we had with a woman from Thailand.
"My grandmother had an elephant." "Did the elephant work in the jungle hauling out Teak logs?" "No, he was just a pet." What was his name?" "We just called him "Big." "What did you do with him?" "He carried us to school everyday." "There was a large basket tied on his back, enough for three children, sometimes five." "Did the elephant kneel down for you to get aboard?" "No, there was a stand where we climbed on." "Was it a long ride to school?" "It was about a mile, but we had to cross a river." "We were all naked and carried our clothes so that they wouldn't get wet." "Then we would dress after we crossed the river." "When my father saw that I was beginning to develop breasts, he told me to keep my clothes on, even if they did get wet."

"What was school like?" "You only went to school for four years." "We didn't have any paper or pens." "The teacher had a large blackboard, and we each had a slate tablet and a piece of chalk." "We couldn't take any notes home, everything had to be memorized."

"Were there any other elephants in your village?" "No, only "Big." "There were only twenty-five people in my village, no running water or electricity." "We washed in the river, but we got our drinking water from a pond that was fed by a stream." Everybody washed their clothes there too." No one ever got sick." "My grandmother is ninety-three, and she has had six children at home, and only once, was she ever in a hospital."

"We worked very hard planting and harvesting rice." "When  it got dark, we went to bed.""These kids today don't know what it is to work." (She showed me her bent finger) "That is from pulling rice."

The next time you remember riding a bus to school, imagine going there on an elephant!
I thought readers would find this interesting.

      Aloha
      Grant