Scribblings › Elephants Who Need Elephants

My parents went to Puerto Rico for their honeymoon. Until I was ten years old, I was certain that they'd traveled there in a yellow hot air balloon. I would have sworn to you that my father had projected images of the lift-off during our Sunday night family room slide shows. I forget the context of the conversation in which my mother disabused me of my odd imagining, but I remember suddenly realizing how I'd come up with the image in my mind: It was the wedding of Babar and Celeste, Jean de Brunhoff's picture book pachyderms, King and Queen of the country of the elephants. They were my proto-parents, a long-trunked twosome, whose idealized, quarrel-free coupledom I'd generously transferred onto my own less gentle-souled mom and dad. My primal image of marriage was Babar and Celeste's nearly identical heads, topped with yellow crowns, taking to the air in the wake of their wedding.

You can have your Streisand, boys. I've got a Babs of my own. Growing up with Babar and Celeste as my icons of romance was a lucky stroke of fate. Their bodies, like their heads, were strikingly similar. Yes, there were the scenes in which The Old Lady, Babar's urbane benefactress, hooks the big guy up with a green three-piece suit and a bowler. And there are pages on which Celeste wears a lovely flowered frock. But before these clothiered images arrive, before Babar brings the garb of 'civilization' back from Paris, the elephants are all naked.and in every respect but overall size—which distinguishes adults from children—they all look exactly the same (For those unacquainted with the de Brunhoff oeuvre, Babar and his cohort hail from a jungle which is conveniently adjacent to the City of Light and all of its fine shopping opportunities).

Recently, reading back through Babar, I noticed that every one of those naked elephants, adult and child, has large ears and tusks. They're males, all of them; never mind Celeste's fancy French wedding dress. But even setting this ironic wrinkle aside, I never thought of Babar and Celeste as a man and a woman. I thought of them as elephant and elephant, two of a kind, in love and uplifted. For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to honeymoon in a hot air balloon. I imagine a partner and me floating not-so-high above the ground, able to see our friends and families raising their eyes skyward, smiling and waving to us. I want to know that we are tethered to their gravity, not leaving the orbit of the commonplace, but celebrated for our desire to briefly rise above it, for letting the idea of a storybook romance—the ideal of a perfect union—lift us for a little while. I want to see how it lifts everyone around us.

Idealism lets us rise, even as we know we're bound to the mundane, even as we know we're going to struggle all our petty earthbound struggles. Idealism is the thing that makes us cry at weddings; idealism juxtaposed with the hard-earned knowledge that we can never achieve an ideal... and juxtaposed yet again with the fact that we're going to take another run at it nonetheless.

Every wedding is an exquisitely awkward marriage of idealism and acceptance. Which in and of itself is a case for same-sex marriage, isn't it?

Cockeyed optimism and storybook fantasies are not to be underestimated. They may be the secret of human nature, something pure buried under all the bitterness, to fuel our forward motion. In good time, when I meet my guy, I'd love you to have your rice at the ready. And throw in a peanut or two for luck.