Marathon Sunday, 2014, Williamsburg. On the sidewalk near Glasslands there was the head of Babar. Not a toy. Broadway quality — the kind of thing that comes out of a costume shop and costs somebody real money. Somebody had put it out on the street.

I took it home. I kept it for years. It sat in rooms. People asked about it and I did not have an answer, because there wasn't one. You do not pick up an elephant head because you have a plan for an elephant head. It lives at a friend's place now.

A decade later, someone started calling me Eleff.

That is the whole story and I am aware it isn't one. Nothing caused anything. There was a head on a sidewalk, and there was, much later, a name, and in between there was no thread — only a man carrying an object from apartment to apartment in the way you carry a thing you cannot justify.

What I have come to think is this. You don't name yourself. People try. They pick handles and aliases and stage names and wear them, and mostly you can see the effort from across the room. The names that stick are the ones somebody else hands you, usually without ceremony, usually after watching you for a long time. They see the shape you have been making and they say the word for it, and you think: oh. That was what I was doing.

The song this column is named after was written by a man who made a record about burying his family. Somewhere in it he says he was at a funeral when he understood that he wanted to spend his life with someone. Not in spite of the funeral. Because of it. He is standing in the worst room he has ever been in, and what arrives is not a conclusion about death. It is a person.

I don't think that's a happy ending and I don't think he meant it as one. It's the actual order things happen in. You don't decide to want someone, any more than you decide to pick up an elephant head, any more than you decide what you'll be called. It arrives. Afterward you go looking for the reason, and the reason is a story you build to explain a thing that already happened without asking you.

I have the reason now. A street named for peach blossoms, and a woman whose mother came up from Georgia, and a head on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. All of it assembled backwards, from the far end.

An elephant's memory is famously long. Nobody has ever claimed it was in order.

The Eleffant is a columnist for this newspaper. No lyrics are reproduced here.