Opinion: My father's Valentine's Day cufflinks

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/12/ [login to see] /opinion-my-fathers-valentines-day-cufflinks
"I came across an old Valentine's Day gift this week. A pair of cufflinks, showing white plastic elephants in red shawls, now slightly scuffed.

My mother bought the cufflinks for my father when she saw them in a case on the ground floor of the department store where she worked in Ladies Fine Apparel, 4th floor. She had been divorced from him for about six years, but wrote on the card that Valentine's Day: "Irish elephants never forget."

My father would die in just a few years, at the age of 48. He had a drinking problem. But in the four years after my mother's gift, he wore those elephant cufflinks to school meetings, my 8th grade graduation and at holiday dinners in our small apartment, to which my mother would insist he come. He always held up his cuffs and said, "Jewish elephants remember, too."

My mother would smile and laugh, and I would see once more that while my father's drinking made it impossible for them be together, they still broke into special, fragile bubbles of laughter with each other".