What Jacob hates most in the nursing home is perfectly understandable. The mushy food. The schedules. Having the simplest decisions made for him. At one point, when Rosemary is with him and being her usual kind self, as opposed to other nurses Jacob doesn't like, he remarks, "...I'm so used to being scolded and herded and managed and handled that I'm no longer sure how to react when someone treats me like a real person."

The nursing home scenes with the aging Jacob are well drawn. Gruen knows nursing homes, and I credit her insight. I only wish that real life could turn out as well as this novel's ending.

Here it is - the spoiler. Jacob the nursing home resident gets to run off with the modern circus, like the young Jacob ran off with the Benzini Brothers. In both cases, the circus rescues him from the miserable life he is living. In both cases, it becomes a refuge.

The reader in me, the person who loved reading this book, and loved Jacob, was cheering! Isn't this what we all want? To live our lives doing what we love until the day we die?

It left me wishing I didn't know so much about real life. If I didn't know that the nursing home would be in huge legal trouble is they just "lost" a resident; if I didn't know that there would be a heavy search, and that this nice man who was going to let Jacob run off with him would more likely be arrested for, at the very least, enabling the disappearance of a vulnerable person, or some such thing; if I could have shut up that voice in my head that kept telling me this is what people want, but not what they get - if I could have gotten to that place, I would have been better able to enjoy the ending.

Instead, the book haunts me. I can't let it go. Could it be that it brings back my dad's story in Minding Our Elders, where I wrote of the time Dad was telling me that he needed me to do three things for him: get the City Commission minutes, the words to the Hail Mary and - bring an elephant to Fargo? I succeeded with the first two. I failed with the last. A tear trickles down my cheek as I write this. I envy Gruen's liberties as a novelist. She orchestrated the perfect ending. I could not.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006, is available in bookstores and online.

To learn more about Carol, please go to http://www.mindingourelders.com/ or http://www.mindingoureldersblogs.com/.