elephant skin

“Look, scrub yourself in the shower with this,” he said – my father, the Army captain, tossing me a brush of stiffest bristles. It poked my skin.

“I’ve been doing it since I was your age. Test that,” he said, baring a bulging forearm for me to pinch. “Like an elephant. They try to draw my blood, the needle bounces off!”

What twelve-year-old boy wouldn’t want skin like his father’s – man’s skin, needles bouncing off like bullets, a weathered hide impervious to all? In the shower I scoured myself for days, scraping until red-raw, the towel prickly-stiff on my tenderized flesh.

Before long I gave up. Sour grapes: who needed elephant skin? Could it bounce away callous words, a father’s cool disinterest? How ludicrous for elephants to be stiffened so against the ravages of – what? Open air? – untouchable through dense, hardened leather.

And now I am a man – my father’s former age. My forearms are thinner than his, my skin more like a mole’s: ground down by years of grit and harshest earth, chafed and scuffed and grated until worn smooth – neither raw nor rough, but supple, sensitive to slight elements. No Army skin.

Somehow, though, it better fits the mold of man.