When I think back to when I was a kid, I can no longer separate my love for snow, from my love of no school (because of snow). Come the winter, I found religion. I prayed for snow. At night my nose would be pressed to a front window of our house on Alston Avenue… looking at the street light just to our left… looking for the first glimpse of snow, hoping to see snow falling in the cone of projected light. I knew that “fat” flakes were useless… too much snow would accumulate on tree branches, and not enough on the street — where it counted! I wanted small tiny flakes, driving down in an unearthly manner. I wanted no school.
But there was more…
Snow and its thick blanket magnified the essence of the home for me. A place of warmth, a place of safety, a place of family. A blizzard could be raging, wind beating against the panes and I couldn’t have been happier. The tomato soup with buttered saltine crackers was better, the crackling log fire was better, the hot chocolate was better, my socks felt better… and the stories were better.
I may have prayed for snow on Alston Avenue. But I loved the snow in Woodbury. New Haven snow was OK, but Woodbury snow was better… the homes were further apart… larger stretches of uninterrupted snow fields. And more to the point, when it rained in New Haven, Woodbury, up in soft hills of Litchfield County, got snow. When we traveled up to Woodbury for a weekend visit to my Aunt Meggie and Uncle Saul, it felt like we were going to Vermont… and on the drive north I found myself thinking, “too bad I didn’t go to school in Woodbury.”
Meggie and Saul had this marvelous house on Carthage Rd. I think that it dated back to the 1700s. Over the years the house had been added to by a score of previous occupants… room by room, level by level. It was a house of small spaces. Spaces that could best be appreciated on a cold winter’s night.
The house itself was set back a good fifty yards from the road, the drive snaked its way thru a combination of fir trees to one side and a stand of white birches to the other. Sugar maples protected the den side of the house… and in the darkness the variety of sound created by the wind running thru those bare limbs on a winter’s evening was hypnotic. Add a driving snow, as there was one January Saturday night, and the stage was set for my Uncle Saul.
I loved the stories read to me on Alston Avenue. Bedtime stories in Woodbury were different. I was accustomed to being read to in my room. But when we visited Woodbury, story time was in the downstairs den. My Mom & Dad and Aunt Meggie would linger at the dinning table over coffee and dessert, content to talk the night away. Saul would wait for me to join him in the den after I got into my pajamas and got cleaned up for bed. He was in charge of story time… and a story never came from a book.
The den in Woodbury was packed with stuff. Artwork, figurines, bookshelves crammed with books and bric brac, a Sharp’s buffalo rifle (my personal favorite) hung on the wall above the couch… and a huge standing globe occupied the furthest corner of the room. When I entered the room on that January night, Saul slowly turned the globe and pivoted its orientation ’til he found his desired spot. I was used to this. Saul treated “den stuff” as props for his bedtime stories. I always tried guessing which curiosity would be used in his tale.
“Jimmy… this is the Mediterranean Sea and for hundreds of years the most important and powerful civilizations of the Western World rimmed its shores. One of the greatest Empires the World has ever seen was centered here… Rome.”
I could hear the wind driving small flakes against the den window. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the globe…
“My story tonight is about a brave and courageous General who 2200 years ago took on the glorious Roman Army and won! It was like the Dodgers beating the Yankees in 1955. The name of the great general was Hannibal… and he came from here… a place called Carthage, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea.
“At the time of this story, Hannibal had his Army here… in New Carthage which is called Spain today. And to conquer Rome he had to get here… Italy. He had to go thru this part of France… nice beaches… and here, the Alps… huge mountains covered in snow. And this was all before he reached Italy. And he didn’t have planes, trains or buses to help him get from here to there. He had to walk all the way… from here to there.”
To emphasize this, Uncle Saul trudged around the den, heaving and sighing and looking belaboured with each step. Corny? Sure… but not to a little kid who delighted in the “theatre”.
“No easy way to get to Italy… But Hannibal was set on beating the Romans… AND he had a secret weapon.”
Secret weapon?! What kid doesn’t want to hear about secret weapons?
“Hannibal had elephants!”
This didn’t seem like a big deal to me. Elephants? Go to the Bronx Zoo, watch a Tarzan movie, there were elephants all over the place.
“Jimmy, back then no one had seen elephants before. They thought they were monsters! Dinosaurs! Little kids would go running home, ‘Mommy, Mommy! There’s a triceratops walking down the street!'”
Well… that struck home. What kid wouldn’t trade every dessert for a lifetime to see a triceratops walking down the street!
“Hannibal’s army had archers, spear guys… and elephant guys! Sorta like artillery units, infantry units and armored units! They had to cross France. And this was before they invented wine! And over here {and he pointed to the Rhone River} he had to fool the Romans. You see… the Romans were wise to Hannibal and they sent one of their Armies to beat him even before he got to Italy. The Romans thought they were smart. Hannibal was smarter! He went up River and crossed here… and the Romans had no one to fight except the fleas!”
The wind spit into the window.
“These Roman guys hadn’t even seen these elephants yet… so they were clueless. They thought they were just dealing with archers, spear guys and cooks. It’s like the Yankees not knowing about Campy, Jackie, Gil & the Duke! Hannibal had elephants. Not zoo elephants… but war elephants!“
War elephants! My head spun.
“These elephants were big, mean and armored!”
Uncle Saul reached for a box on the floor near the globe… he opened it and retrieved a Pickelhaube… the distinctive helmet with a spike that the Prussian military favored in the 19th Century. He put it on, secured it in place, and dropped to all fours and continued his story and I retreated to the security of the blue club chair.
“The war elephants were like Sherman Tanks! Thick body armor all over… and it took a team to operate an elephant — just like a tank. First, there was the elephantier. He commanded the team… he directed the elephant from a padded seat just behind the elephant’s head. There was a protected platform on top of the elephant where two archers were stationed. They would shoot arrows and hurl things…”
“What do you mean hurl Uncle Saul?”
“When they ran out of arrows, they had a supply of good sized rocks that they would hurl, throw, at the enemy. And when they ran out of rocks they would hurl insults… they would shout down to the enemy, ‘Hey! Your mother has a fat bee-hind!’ That would drive the Romans nuts!”
“Oh…”
“And completing the elephant team was the peanutier… he’s the guy who schlepped sacks of roasted peanuts to feed the elephant… and finally the sanitary engineer… he’s the guy who cleaned up after the elephant did a number two.”
Uncle Saul proceeded to crawl around the room… making grumbling and trumpeting sounds… doing his best to play the part of an elephant… a war elephant!
I tried not to laugh; but I think I let a small giggle escape.
“OK. Hannibal dodges a ‘bullet’ in the lower Rhone. He still has to cross the Alps. He has his Army and 37 elephants. And these elephants don’t like the snow, and it’s snowing a ton in those mountains! And it’s freezing cold like you can’t believe. Even the soldiers are angry… they didn’t have underwear in those days!”
On cue, the wind gust picked up its intensity outside the den window. Uncle Saul crawled over to the couch, shivering he trumpeted and grumbled, and took Aunt Meggie’s afghan and wrapped it around his shoulders, and continued in his travels crawling around the coffee table with its shaky leg, and headed to the floor lamp and lifted his leg.
“Look at this! It’s so cold here in the Alps, I can’t pee!” And he let out a massive trumpet. “It was so cold that their number two froze hard as rocks and the sanitary engineers had to collect them to use, if need be, against the Romans. The Engineers weren’t too happy about harvesting frozen number two. Most of the elephants died in the Alps crossing. But enough made it to Italy’s Po River Plain at Ticinus where Hannibal’s Army met the Roman Army led by the Consul Publius Cornelius Scipio. The Romans were stunned. Some of their guys mumbled, ‘holy crow… I think those are triceratops!’ And before they knew it, the Romans felt the sting of arrows, then rocks… and then insults, ‘Your Mother uses bottled sauce!’ And you can’t say anything worse to a Roman! It was even worse then getting hit with a frozen turd! Then Hannibal beat them at Trebia, at Lake Trasimene, and then his greatest victory of all at Cannae. Hannibal and his elephants couldn’t be beaten!”
And Uncle Saul trumpeted and grunted, charged around the room… put his head down with his spiked helmet and crawled full speed into the coffee table, its weak leg gave way, he let out a war whoop, crawled around the room, another trumpet, and he lowered his head once more to finish off the table, he whacked into it, then he reared up on his knees and brought his fists down on the table to utterly crush it.
My eyes bugged out! I sat in the safety of the blue club chair. What would the other adults think? After Uncle Saul stopped his trumpeting and growling, all I could hear was the muffled sound of laughter coming from the dinning room. I was exhausted, I felt like I had been an elephantier at Cannae. I told Uncle Saul that this was the best story ever, I was happy that Hannibal had won… I certainly didn’t know what Saul would say to Meggie about destroying the coffee table… I went to the guest bedroom with visions of elephants tramping thru a blizzard and stomping thru Roman villages.
I never got a chance to ask Uncle Saul how he chose his topics for story time. Sadly, he passed away well before I had the smarts to ask about his creativity. Luckily, Aunt Meggie had remained a score plus more in years… to a day when I did have time and opportunity to ask the fun questions and fill in some of the blanks.
On a visit to her home in Chatham I asked, “Aunt Meggie, the time that Uncle Saul told me that story at your place up in Woodbury… how did he cover clobbering your coffee table? I mean… what story did he make up for you?”
“That table?” And Meggie just laughed, and laughed… and shook her head. “That table? I had been asking Saul to throw that rickety table out for years! If you sneezed it would collapse! He just found a unique way to do it… his way. When we heard that tumult coming from the den, we suspected what was going on. We tried to keep our laughter in… we didn’t want to upstage Saul’s performance.”
That’s my Uncle Saul. He made stories come alive. He probably bought that old farm house on Carthage Rd. just to have a reason to tell a story about Hannibal and his elephants. He just had to wait a few years for the weather conditions, an appropriate audience and a reason to annihilate a piece of furniture to come together. But Saul knew that day would come…