Dancing Elephant Press Photography Prompt | January 2023

You Say Elephant, I Say Eletonnen.

Do you have a favorite word your child said wrong?

I was inspired by Vidya’s IKEA elephants. I knew exactly where she was!

This pillow was designed and stitched by my friend, Joan Galantha, back in the ’70s. She was, and is, a brilliant artist with whom I shared early motherhood moments for several years as neighbors.

Joan tells a story of being incredibly lonely, and so she held up a piece of paper with her phone number on it when I was standing at my kitchen window. She swears I pulled down the window shade. She was devastated! She didn’t know anyone in town and was dealing with a workaholic husband and a baby suffering from colic!

I swear I didn’t see her!!

The day before Thanksgiving, 1972, I was preheating my gas oven for a pumpkin pie I’d made. When I opened the oven gas had built up and flames shot out the oven door setting my hair on fire. I was 1000 months pregnant! (Okay, my due date was about a week away, December 2nd.)

I grabbed my daughter and ran screaming across the shared driveway and pounded on Joan’s door. She opened it and almost passed out from fear!

As it turned out, I was fine. My long, blonde hair had burnt on one side, and the eyebrows on that side were gone. Other than that, all I had was a bit of an uneven sunburn for a few days.

The pumpkin pie didn’t survive.

So, that’s how we met! I can’t even think of that two-flat without Joan being in my thoughts. We were joined at the hip after that. This is why the eletonnen (eletonnen?) pillow is so important.

The pillow combines two of my favorite things about that home. Bonding with Joan over motherhood, and my son Scott’s playfulness about the word elephant.

Scott had an outrageous vocabulary and said many complicated words just fine, but when it came to elephant, he refused. He refused with a gleam in his eye.

I would say, “ELL-UH-FUNT!” and he would say, “ELL-UH-TONNEN!” and I would say, “ELL-UH-FUNT!” and he would say, “ELL-UH-TONNEN!” and on, and on the game would go. I’d say several harder words and he repeated them without fail. I’d try to sneak in an ‘elephant’ and … game on!

To this day, my first thought when seeing an elephant is “ELETONNEN!” When I see TikToks with elephants, my brain says, “ELETONNEN!” When walking through IKEA and the big bin of elephants … yep, ‘ELETONNENS!”

When I see this beautiful pillow sitting on my chair, well, you get the picture.

Make sure to check out the other Dancing ̶E̶l̶e̶p̶h̶a̶n̶t̶ Eletonnen Press articles for positivity and joy!

Thank you, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, for introducing me to this publication, and your dancing elephants!

You can’t read many articles without joining Medium. You can do that for a mere $4.99/month, and cancel anytime. You won’t be sorry!