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Living the Life of Holly
by Holly Winter
© 2007
Collection by Mandate

My friend Ralph started it.

If he’d given me half eaten worms, I’d have been just as upset. “I hate it.”

“Come on. This is just what your place needs: something fun.” He turned the treasure in his hands, showing me all angles. “Now… this is fun.”

I sized up the plastic elephant planter. “Dollar store?”

“Yes! But. You can’t really tell.” He turned it gently so I could see the back. “It looks expensive.”

“It looks plastic. I’m not keeping it.”

He pulled a small potted plant from my sill, and shook it gently till the plant landed with a thud in his hand. “You’ll be glad I did this. Wait till you see your present with a plant inside…”

“No. No. No.”

In less time than it took me to stop him, my plant was sitting in the back of a plastic elephant.

“What a terrible excuse for a planter.” I sulked.

“No. It’s great.” He put the plastic on the kitchen table, as a center piece.

Um. No way. I quickly moved it to the floor.

He stood back, smiling. “You’ll see. You’ll like it.”

Moments later, my manager Dave knocked on the door. Ralph proudly showed off my new gift, carefully pointing out the hollow tusks.

Dave clapped his hands together. “I have just the thing. I didn’t know it was your birthday.”

“It’s really not.” I tried to lie. Too late. He returned with an elephant pillow and placed it lovingly on my couch.

“No. Take it home.”

He ignored me, arranging the other pillows around it.

“I’m not keeping it.” I said to the two men who plopped themselves against elephant comfort.

“Perfect!” Ralph promised.

When my friend Leena called later, I expected sympathy from her. She’d been dogged into collecting Spider Man memorabilia after forgetting to take down a picture in her middle school English classroom one spring. The following fall new students arrived, and after admiring her art, considered her a gallery for all things Spidey. She never tired of how many students had time to draw elaborate pictures of Spiderman, but forgot their five paragraph essays.

“Ralph and Dave are bringing me elephants.” I whispered to her over the phone as we made plans to lunch the following day. “I’ll need your help. I don’t much like elephants.”

She promised her support, then showed up with a wall hanging of three elephants raising their tusks in triumph. “For your collection.”

“I hate you.” I seethed.

She laughed and laughed. “Trust me, Spiderman is so much worse. Now students start practicing drawing Spidey years before they have me. You wouldn’t believe the awfulness.”

When I got my first elephant gift at school, I went into a complete and total fog: I’d been so careful to never mention the animal that never forgets, how could they know?

“Yup.” Short-brown-haired boy said. “Ralph was right. You DO love elephants.”

I tried to consider what he was saying.

“Look…” boy beamed to his classmates, “just look at her face. See how happy she is?”

Ralph? Ralph talked to my students? Ralph talked to my students about elephants? How? When?

I opened my third elephant.

Keep. My. Voice. Even. Half smile. “When did you talk to Ralph?”

“Remember?” Long-red-hair girl said. “That time he came in to talk about being a pilot?”

“I was here the whole time….”

“You got a phone call!” the class chimed.

Did I?

“Ralph told us to tell everyone….about how much you love elephants….so we all remembered.”

After assuring my students that I didn’t love elephants, I agreed to keep each present for one year, then re-gift it to a student with the highest points. My students, happy to earn presents of any kind, even ones their parents had paid for, worked harder than ever to own a part of my elephant collection.

I guess those college child psychology classes paid off.

Now finally, after years of elephant suffering, this past spring the last unwanted elephant was re-gifted to a lucky sixth-grader who almost gave it back to me, thus forcing me to endure another year with a huge elephant poster on my classroom wall.

“You know, Ms. Winter, I want to give it back to you to make you suffer, but… I really want it…..”

“I promise….If you take it, I’ll suffer in other ways…..I promise to suffer in other ways.”

By some stoke of luck, she kept the poster and for the first time in years, I was free. The three-year- elephant-curse was finally over. Sure I still had the pillow and the planter, since Ralph and Dave checked on them regularly, but I’d even managed to re-gift Leena’s picture.

I considered myself elephant-free when my friend, Music, invited me to dinner.

He steamed fish and made me laugh about the slugs eating their way through his garden as we ate on the patio.

Man. Music and I seemed to have some chemistry going on. I’d never noticed it before. Had it started tonight, or was I blind to it in the past?

No. No. No room for a man in my life right now. I was busy finishing my book. No distractions.

Flowers burst out of his gardens, throwing whites, oranges and reds into the air. He jumped up to fix a cage around a tomato plant.

I knew he was ‘just’ a friend. We’d never discussed that line, it had simply appeared. I’d never thought about it before. But. As I relaxed in his back yard, I wondered if we might consider the possibilities of more.

No. No. I wanted to get my book written. No distractions. No men allowed. No room for a man. I waved the man-cloud out of my mind as we moved into the living room and settled onto the couch, ready to watch a movie.

I moved some pillows out of the way. One caught my eye. Red. Frills. Had a large elephant sewn into the center.

An elephant? A warning light flashed in my mind’s eye. Was he an elephant collector? No way. All bets were off. I could never, ever be interested in a man with an elephant collection. I mean, what kind of person has an elephant on his couch?

I held the pillow up. “You have an elephant pillow?” I mean. Who would have an elephant on his couch? Yeah. Ok. Me. But, not by choice.

“Sure do.” He put the DVD into the player.

Did he buy it himself? Did he like elephants? He didn’t give elephants as gifts, did he?

“My step-mom bought it for me. She thought I might like it since I had so many worldly things in my living room.” He shrugged. “She figured it was a match.”

He’d been gifted with an elephant pillow? And… he kept it…

We had chemistry. We were spending a lot of time together. We laughed a lot. And we both had pillows with big creatures that were gifted to us.

Maybe we aren’t defined by the things we own, but by the gifts we keep. I chose to keep a gift from a friend who thinks a dollar planter looks rich, and a gift from a friend who truly believes the elephant pillow was a treasure shared.

“You know… I have an elephant pillow, too.”

He sat next to me on the couch. “Yeah. I noticed that.”

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Copyright © 2007 by Holly Winter
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