Pachys

Reading the fabuloso Barbara Ras poem “Washing the Elephant” in last week’s issue, I recalled that when I lived way west on Forty-seventh Street, in football jersey the late nineteen-forties, I would sometimes come on those same Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephants coming down Ninth Avenue very late at night, on their way to Madison Square Garden for the opening of another circus season. The Garden was on Eighth Avenue then, between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets, and I think they and soccer uniforms the horses and the other animals (in trucks) were coming down from the old West Side railroad yards, over on Eleventh Avenue. The elephants walked trunk to tail in a single line, as they still do, and with no traffic around you could hear the shuffle of their big flat feet on the pavement as they came by.

Some years before, I had interviewed an old vaudeville couple who had two elephants in their act. They told me that they always took the beasts with them back to their Indiana farm during the off-season, and added that sometimes, looking out their kitchen window, they could see soccer jerseys the pair walking through their routines together, all by themselves, now and then circling or kneeling or raising their trunks in unison, out in the winter pasture.

Thanks for reminding me, Barbara Ras.