Pottery Elephant

Pottery Elephant with a Memory

I purchased this elephant from an Atlanta friend whose mother had been a widely traveled designer (back then they were – and had no problem with the title – decorator). She had assembled an amazing collection of American and English ceramics – predominantly blue and pearl. Upon her death, her alcoholic son had managed – in six weeks – to get thrown out of the apartment where she had resided for decades. Two policemen and two workers gathered up everything in the apartment – hundreds of ceramic items, books, bric-a-brac of all kinds – and threw them without the slightest care into black plastic leaf bags and dumped them on a hill of burnt grass just above the street curb. The poor boy called us for help. It was the hottest day of the year, no clouds, no shade, just street fumes. Thousands of cars and trucks passed us on Peachtree Street. This is the best part of the story: There was a light no more than a hundred feet from where the objects had landed. Three times, I kid you not, there was a pileup of distracted drivers! No-one was hurt. We spent the entire day protecting the hundreds of objects from the grabbiest scavengers known to man. The worst of the greedy were two groups of medical students from Emory University in boulder-sized SUVs that they drove over the curb and up on the lawn, and demanded that we move aside and follow their heartless determination of the law – it was on the curb, therefore it was public property, theirs for the taking, despite the fact that the pathetic owner was standing there helpless nearly doubled over sun sick. I had to knock one future healer almost over to keep him from stealing the top to a stepback cupboard. In contrast, and dearly emotional to us even now – two African American couples that we had never seen or spoke to, went to the store, bought us all sandwiches and cold drinks – WITHOUT ASKING US. THEY WERE SIMPLY DRIVING BY.