Water for Elephants

I got on the airplane to Dallas and opened up my book. I began to read:

I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.

When you’re five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m—you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder it this is the beginning of the end. It is of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.

…What’s on the menu tonight? I know some of us don’t have teeth, but I do, and I want pot roast. My wife’s, complete with leathery bay leaves. I want carrots. I want potatoes boiled in their skins. And I want a deep, rich Cabernet Sauvignon to wash it all down, not apple juice from a tin. But above all, I want corn on the cob.

Sometimes I think that if I had to choose between an ear of corn or making love to a woman, I’d choose the corn. Not that I wouldn’t love to have a final roll in the hay—I am a man yet, and some things never die—but the thought of those sweet kernels bursting between my teeth sure sets my mouth watering. It’s fantasy, I know that. Neither will happen. I just like to weigh the options, as though I were standing in front of Solomon: a final roll in the hay or an ear of corn. What a wonderful dilemma. Sometimes I substitute an apple for the corn.

Later came a beautiful scene where one of the nurses gave Jacob a bowl of fruit she had brought for her lunch. It had strawberries, melon, and “apple, for God’s sake.”

This was just the first chapter. I kept reading. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

Jacob never remembers if he’s 90 or 93, but he remembers a lot of other things. Gruen takes you through those memories beginning with how he found himself in the 1930's working on a traveling circus.

Gruen was asked how she approached the plot for the book.

Her response:

For Water for Elephants, which was the first historical thing I’ve written, I did all the research ahead of time. I needed to feel that I new the subject matter in and out.

I hate outlines. I hate outlines, hate them, hate them.

I usually know what the crisis of the book is going to be, though I don’t know how I‘m going to get there. I try to make it bad enough that I don’t know how I‘m going to get out of it. And when I get there, I have to get out of it. I just get myself geared up, and I write every day and see what happens.

One night after I learned I had gall stones I opened my fridge to make a salad. As I sat across from my friend eating a fat chicken burrito, I ate a salad with lettuce, bell pepper, and apple. Jacob got to eat apple before we got out of chapter one. I’ve had many apples over the course of my life. However, the best apples I’ve ever had have been since reading this book. Like the small apple pieces I cut up in that salad. For some reason I never fully appreciated the taste until now.

The book ends as beautifully as it began. The ride there was a memorable one. Water for Elephants.