Monday, August 12, 2019

World Elephant Day

Trunks up! This is World Elephant Day!



Way back, many decades ago, when I had just come to the United States, I was enrolled in high school and they picked classes for me that they thought would be appropriate for a sixteen year old kid who didn't speak much English. One of the classes was "Shop". My teacher gave me a block of wood and instructed me to sculpt an elephant. I didn't even know the English names for the most common tools, my artistic skills did not extend to sculpture, so I was totally lost.

I have since been told that sculpting an elephant is easy, "you just chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant". Back then I really had no idea on how to proceed. So I looked around for some other class. When I told my shop teacher that I was switching to physics he was aghast, "you are giving up shop for physics???" He just couldn't understand that to me me physics seemed easier than shop.

Many years later I received this hand-sculpted elephant as a gift from my mother. It has an honored place on my desk.

Happy World Elephant Day to all! Trunks Up!!

.:. © 2019 Ludwig Keck

2 comments:

  1. Never knew there was such a day as World Elephant Day, Ludwig, but not surprised as there is a day for nearly everything now. I have studied physics or taken a shop class, but both would have proved a challenge to me. Your mother gave you a nice carved elephant.

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  2. 👍 Hi Ludwig, Thank you for putting attention on the endangered Elephants ! 🐘 🐘 🐘

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