E is for elephant, D is for dumb parents

Edith headed off today with two flags for "F" day in show-and-share, the gay pride rainbow flag and the United Nations flag. I confess I get a certain pleasure out of the fact that those continue to be her favorites.

Last week she brought in her Edith puzzle, and Harrison brought in a toy elephant, which prompted sufficient interest among the children that they have embarked on a whole elephant study this week. Trying to reinforce at home what they learn in school, I noticed a copy of Dumbo that we had inherited sitting on top of the TV last night and asked Edith if she'd like to watch some of it.

Now give me some credit. I remember Dumbo and am aware it's a heart-wrenchingly sad story. I can hardly bear to watch it at 31. How could the writers fail to reunite Dumbo and his mother at the end??

My plan was simply to show Edith the opening sequences: the stork bringing babies to all the circus animals, the animals loading onto the circus train to start the circus season, the "Casey, Jr." song, and the stork arriving on the train, a little belatedly, with Mrs. Jumbo's baby. I was going to wait until Mrs. Jumbo unwrapped the package and saw her little baby and all the elephants in the car cooed over him, then stop the tape right before the other elephants started mocking his all-too-African ears.

I didn't realize Edith would be able to read the mood of the movie from the get-go. All it took was three seconds watching Mrs. Jumbo scanning the skies for her bundle from the stork, which was late in coming, and Edith's lip began to tremble. "Where's the mommy elephant's baby?" she asked anxiously. I assured her it was coming.

No good. She watched the animals all get on the train, Mrs. Jumbo the only one without a baby yet, and she broke into aching sobs. Tom and I had never seen her that kind of distraught. It was clearly one of those moments of lost innocence, a stunned recognition that the world can be deeply, terrifyingly SAD.

Edith was sobbing and panicked. She asked over and over for the mommy and baby elephant to be together. We fast-forwarded to the part where Dumbo arrives. But the frames actually tend to show one or the other of them at a time; only for a very few seconds are they actually pictured in the same frame. Edith kept asking plaintively, "Where's the mommy? Where's the baby?" depending on who was on the screen.

We wound up fast-forwarding through the movie trying to find any moment that would reassure her that mommy and baby were together. There's only, of course, that wretched scene in which Mrs. Jumbo is locked up and pokes her trunk out through the bars to rock the little elephant she can't even see. Needless to say, that hardly did the trick.

Boy, what an error in judgment. Edith brought home a headband she'd made in school with an elephant trunk and ears on it. I feel like I ought to be the one to wear it. Just call me Dumbo.