My wife thought me in a rather giggly mood tonight. “Haven’t seen you laugh that hard in a long, long time,” she said. ‘m sorry for that – I enjoy laughing and would love to spread more of the joy.
What had me so tickled was probably less the thing that amused me than the freedom to feel amused. A great burden was lifted today. We came, finally, to the end of a long, long couple of weeks, and were tired, mind, body, and soul.
For we had been to see the elephant.
One fine spring day in 255 B.C., an exemplary Roman army of 15,000, flanked by 500 cavalrymen, stepped out onto a vast green Tunisian plain and began marching toward a like-sized army of mercenaries, fighting for Carthage.
Though well-matched in numbers, the Romans had every reason to feel confident about the coming fray. Their navy had recently swept the Carthaginians from the seas, and this same army had already conquered the nation’s two greatest cities. The only reason the Carthaginians were still fighting was that the Roman terms of surrender were more brutal than total defeat.
The battle was joined, and the Romans were bearing down fast on the Carthaginians when the latter suddenly divided to create two long, wide aisles between their ranks. Down those aisles came thundering creatures the likes of which the Romans had never seen or imagined: African elephants, 10 feet high at the shoulder, ears flung wide to a 12-foot span, heads wrapped in iron armor, trunks stretched out, reaching toward the astonished men before them.
The Romans staggered back, spun to run – and the elephants were upon them. Winding trunks began grabbing the invaders and hurling them through the air. Men who stumbled were trampled into the ground. The Romans fled pell-mell for safety, but elephants can keep up a 15-mile-an-hour trot for a long time. And behind them came the Carthaginians with their swords. Only 500 Romans survived the battle – presumably, the 500 with swift horses beneath them.
That may or may not have been the source of a saying that was apparently very popular in the old United States, around the time of the Civil War. Soldiers blue and gray would come home, often worse for the wear and more than a little sobered by what they’d seen and experienced on the battlefield.
“I’ve been to see the elephant,” they said, and the idea was that they’d come within a whisper of death, and lived to tell the tale. Pioneers, heading west, took up the phrase, using it in writing home to tell of their more harrowing adventures on the sprawling frontier.
Our family’s adventure came with my wife’s annual physical a few weeks ago, when some tests prompted some x-rays that showed things the doctor couldn’t place and didn’t like to see. She ordered a biopsy, which just isn't one of those words calculated to put the patient at ease. After the biopsy came the waiting. And the praying.
Would you rather wait and pray for your own test results, or your spouse’s? Your parent’s? Your child’s? Your friend’s?
Same here.
The doctors, to their credit, sped the process along … but with cancer tests, as with the Lord, “a day is as a thousand years.” That’s how we came to sprout so much gray in our hair, in the course of one three-thousand-year weekend.
But this morning, the report at last came through. “Benign,” the doctor said.
Joy, tears, prayers, thanksgiving. And tonight, the husband’s a little giddy.
The story goes that one day an old farmer, trundling down the road on a wagon loaded up with fresh vegetables and eggs for sale, heard tell of a circus visiting the nearby town. He’d never seen a circus, and had always been especially curious to find out what an elephant looked like.
He turned his wagon around, snapped his whip over the horses’ heads, and went a-galloping for town.
He soon met the circus, parading down the road straight at him – and led by nothing less than a great elephant, which, nudged on by its handler, cheerfully trumpeted a greeting. The sound considerably agitated his horses, who took it in their heads to accelerate immediately in the opposite direction.
They turned that wagon on a dime and it flipped, flinging the farmer into some nearby bushes and all of his eggs and produce across the dusty road. The old man staggered to his feet, though, in time to watch the parade pass by.
Once it had passed, he recruited some friends to help him fetch back his horses, turn his wagon back over, and clean up the mess. The friends, glad he was all right, offered their condolences over the considerable money he would lose because of the accident.
“Oh, I don’t give a hang for that,” the farmer said, grinning ear to ear. “I’ve seen the elephant.”
So, I’m in good company on this, feeling giddy at the news. And it's not just me and the farmer. George Washington was still a young man when he had the misfortune of being at the front of the line at the exact moment when the bloody French and Indian War began. In minutes, hundreds dropped dead all around him, yet miraculously, every one of the thousand or so musket balls shot at him that day (many from point blank range) missed.
After the fact, he dropped a line to his brother, relating the experience. “I heard the bullets whistle,” he said, “and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
Suspect those charms are reserved for those who actually dodge the bullet, literally and figuratively. I was this giddy a few years ago, when the beloved pup we were warned had only days to live drew an extraordinary stay of execution, and enjoyed four more years of home-and-garden adventure.
But the day came, as it does for us all, when he went to see the elephant, and didn’t return.
So, the goofy good cheer will pass. But for now, I will look upon my beloved, who has passed through the shadow of the pachyderm, and give thanks, basking in the happy joy.
What I feel was best expressed not by the worthy Washington but by another, later president: John Quincy Adams.
Adams is one of only two presidents to go from the presidency to serving in Congress – in his case, the House of Representatives. His 17 years there, ending in his death on the House floor, were marked primarily by his almost single-handed war on the so-called “gag rule” that forbade any serious discussion of the slavery issue in the House.
Through his fight, he came to be regarded as the most formidable foe of slavery in the U.S., and his fellow representatives actually tried to publicly censure him for his views. It took eight exhausting years, but he finally succeeded in getting the “gag rule” repealed, restoring free speech in the American Congress.
As the vote ended, Adams – seated at his desk – was heard to whisper, “Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of Almighty God!” There, friends, was a man who knew the great goodness of the Lord, and His mercies when he experienced them.
Here is another.
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