What's up? It's Major.

Today's episode of The Slowdown is selected and presented by the poet and writer Maggie Smith.

I'll return to the host chair on Monday, February 17th.

I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

When my daughter was small-down, we used to take her to watch the circus train unload in a nearby suburb.

The police blocked off the roads to traffic so that elephants could walk single file up Grandview Avenue past the restaurants and storefronts.

I still have an image in my mind of my daughter sitting up on her father's shoulders, transfixed.

Recently, we watched a nature documentary about elephants,

and I asked my daughter if she remembered watching them walk up the

middle of a city street. She said, that really happened? I thought I dreamed that. Of course she

thought she imagined it. This fantastical but very true thing.

Our earliest memories are blurry.

In them, the line between real and imagined seems especially thin.

Today's poem walloped me with its deep wisdom about childhood, memory, and love.

Washing the Elephant by Barbara Rass Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant?

Begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands,

in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,

the cratered full moon's light, fueling the windy, spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said,

of course you'll recognize your parents in heaven?

Instead of, being one with God will make your mother and father pointless.

That was back when I was young enough to love them absolutely,

...