An Elephant Walks into a Bar...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

My dad is an unapologetic punster.

A recent favorite, since you asked?

A Roman Centurion walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and gets five beers.

But it was my mom who, welcoming me home from a long day at work, took one look at my anxious face and said, “How do you eat an elephant?” Expecting a joke, I sighed. “One bite at a time,” she said.

The recorded history of Old Newbury is vast, complex, contested, overwhelming. The list of things that I know nothing about is elephantine. So I make lists of “bites.”

Learn the difference between a brig and a brigantine (call Graham at Lowell’s Boat Shop). Find out when 123 Water Street was built (look up the property in the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System (MACRIS), find nothing, look for pictures, find nothing, look at fire insurance maps, find nothing, realize a full deed chain search is needed, take a deep breath and put that bite aside for now). Identify the most likely place of worship for a Lutheran (not Orthodox) Lithuanian family in Newburyport to worship in the early 20th century (First Parish Church of Newbury, turns out). You get the idea.

The beautiful thing about history to me is that it is, in a sense, unknowable, though I intend to spend my entire life nibbling away at it. We are constantly choosing what should be saved and studied. We, the storytellers, writers, collectors and archivists, have always made decisions about which lives matter more. These decisions are based on bias, love, status, experience, ignorance, interest, conscious and subconscious desires, dreams, fears…

Years ago, I developed an unexpected friendship with an older woman who had grown up as a servant of sorts in a large household. Both of her parents exchanged room and board for their labor, and though it was never explicitly stated, the children were aware of their status. I asked her how she and her siblings experienced growing up in that environment. She snorted. “We were all raised by different people,” she said, then went on to explain that each of her siblings had very different memories based on their age, personality, sensitivity, friendships.

Her eldest sister, a teenager during the Great Depression, told me that she never felt any different from their neighbors as everyone seemed to be struggling. My friend, a decade younger, felt like she lived in a different world than her friends, and went to great lengths to avoid inviting anyone over to her house. Both of these experiences are authentic and valuable, windows on a family, on humanity. The nuance would be lost if only one sister was heard. And yet, we are so often limited to the curated records kept by the select few.

So why bother? Why try so hard to know the unknowable? Why try to eat the elephant? For me, the answer lies in the depth of understanding that we can bring to the place we live and love so much.

We can populate this place with people, separated from us only by time. We can walk down Federal Street, fuzzy up our eyes and see a dirt road, an old jail, horses and barefoot children and tenements.

We can follow it back to before 1789 when it was King Street (back when we had a king!), before that to farm lots and then back to trails to the water, to rocks and trees.

For me, there is another layer. I am sixteen, desperately in love with a boy who lives on Beck Street. We meet in the café in Jabberwocky Books and then we walk around the neighborhood. I have added the distant past to my own remembered experience of that place, and I am exponentially richer for it.

As I sit down at my desk to slog through another sheaf of research requests, I am reminded of another bit of advice, this one from my great-aunt. “One swallow doesn’t make a summer.” In other words, don’t leap to conclusions. Leave yourself open to new information, new perspectives and new evidence. And I learn to take advice, especially from mom.

Note: I am a vegetarian. No elephants were harmed in the writing of this piece.