I'm Hannah Rosen, this is NPR's in Visibilia, and we are thrilled to welcome you to the first

episode of our official fall season. So about once a month, we are going to bring you a story

that may sound a little different from what you usually hear in our spring season.

Maybe a little shorter, it may feature a new voice, no experts, what? No experts?

But the goal of every episode is still to help you see the invisible forces at work in your own

life, because as we like to say, if you can't see them, you can't change.

So after this deeply intellectual preamble, it makes sense that our first episode of the season

would feature a big hunk of plastic, a very beloved one. Producer Megan Kayne has this story.

For many years, the most important thing in Richard's life was an elephant, a five-foot-long,

12-foot-wide, shiny dumbo with a floppy pink hat. It was a dumbo from the Disney ride.

You would climb in and fly into the sky. Richard had bought it and hung it in his living room,

and it spent years there hanging, looking like it was about to come in for a landing onto the coffee

table. For over two decades, it smiled at Richard Kraft as he came down the stairs each morning,

soothing his pain, filling him with fatherly pride. It's a sensation of his friendly face staring at you,

and I can wake up in the morning, go downstairs, and there he is. But then one day he decided

he needed to say goodbye to the plastic dumbo. Just needed to walk away, put it into it.

So we put it up for auction.

The day after I turned 16, I held carry my sick father down the stairs to take him to the hospital.

There in the sterile waiting room, my mother explained as gently as she could that

my father was never going to leave the confines of his hospital bed alive.

I heard the words, but I was really focused on this children's coloring book that was in front of me.

I spent the rest of my father's days facing away from him, coloring in the lines of circus animals and kites.

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