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When I first saw the stone elephants they seemed out of place in front of this large white house on a well-kept street. They're too large for the narrow space they occupy on each side of the walk leading down from a porch, which itself is too small for the house. Without the elephants, it would be a good enough house, three stories high, a snug porch off to one side with a substantial railing. Round back, there is a three-car garage with lace-curtained windows on a second floor. It appears to be a former carriage house with servants' quarters above. It is the garage more than the size and shape of the house that give it the suggestion of a mansion. The elephants do nothing to help the house. But, in themselves, they are splendid.
"Stop the car. Stop the car," I said the first time I saw the elephants. Bob stopped the car even though we were on a mission that meant much to him. We were headed toward Fairview Cemetery to locate the grave of his grandmother who had died in 1942. He had made several attempts over the years to find the grave without success. But that time we had been more scientific and we were certain to locate it. Yet he set aside his expectations and stopped the car so I could get a closer look at the elephants.
They are carved from blocks of stone 3 feet high, a little over 4 feet long and 2 feet thick. They're identical except that they are mirror images of each other, with heads leaning slightly in opposite directions. The trunks, down to the ground turn up toward each other.
I didn't identify the stone elephants with the political party they seem to represent to everyone but me. I have had a lifelong love of the elephant as art. I have several hundred elephants, elephant photographs and drawings, elephant statues - carved, sculpted and molded - and elephant pendants for jewelry. My friend Jill Pigg, an active Republican, always notices my elephant jewelry. Once, when John Cooney and his wife entertained a group of young people from Europe and Africa and invited some locals to visit with the travelers, Jill, her husband Mike and I ended up at table with a young man from Tanganyika. He noticed my elephant pendant, commenting that I must be a Republican.
That brought peals of laughter and a string of almost - but not quite - irreverent protests from Jill, Mike and me. "No. No. Not at all."
"I hadn't realized this about Americans, that persons from the two parties could be so" . . . he groped for the right word . . . "so social together," he said. "I had heard that if you were social, you could be with one or the other, but not both at the same time."
Jill told him the story about sharing a stretch limousine from Pacific to Washington for the Franklin County Republican Central Committee Dinner the year my friend Barbara Bruns was named Republican of the Year. All the big county Republicans were there.
"What are you doing here?" Sen. (then representative) John Griesheimer whispered to me. He knew perfectly well what I was doing there. I had been at Barbara's house two months earlier when he and a delegation came to tell her that she had been selected for the honor.
"I'm telling everyone you're a spy," he said.
"I don't think that's a good idea," I answered. "It might make some people self-conscious."
"OK, I won't," he said. "But you owe me."
I probably still owe him, but here's the thing. John Griesheimer and I have had hundreds of conversations about politics - local, state and federal - without getting mad at each other. I can say the same thing about Jill and Mike Pigg. Mike might get a little ticked off because my comments created a few early morning phone calls at his house but he has never - not once - spoken in anger because we belong to two different parties and approach many issues from two different sets of ideology.
So, I really don't need all my elephants to remind me that polarized viewpoints and convivial good will can share the same dinner table. Still, I liked the idea that the young man from Tanganyika went home with an enlightened view of Americans because of my elephant.
Some time ago I saw a travelogue on China that pictured a large park with two rows of life-sized stone elephants facing each other across a pathway where people were walking. That image had imbedded itself in my memory. The elephants in Linton are about half that size. But they're not in China, they're right there in Linton, Ind., to be experienced first-hand.
On that first visit I worried about standing about in front of a house in a well-kept neighborhood in a small town so I decided to ask the resident of the house about the stone elephants.
No one answered my knock at the door. So I was emboldened to touch the elephants and walk around them. Bob and I took each other's picture with them. "So I'll be sure to remember their size," I said.
Finally, unwilling to leave without more information, I walked to the day care center next door. The young female receptionist sent me to the kitchen where she was sure the older woman would know something about the elephants. The lady in the kitchen sent me to the beauty shop behind the day care center. Linda, who was sitting in the chair about to have her bangs trimmed, warmed immediately to my interest in the elephants.
"Sherman Anderson," at the Citizens National Bank on Main Street will know, she said. Sherman Anderson is president of the bank. He told the receptionist to show us right in. "I know about those elephants," he said. He took the time from his busy day to tell me the story of how the elephants came to be carved.
So there we were recently, back in Linton, the land of grandparents, good conversation and gorgeous stone elephants. It doesn't get any friendlier than that.
