How the Old Man Got His Trunk

Down by the East River stands one of the world’s great medical establishments, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  One day an elderly professor ventured inside with what he thought was a minor complaint and didn’t leave for another 17 days.  In the course of his treatment, his blood oxygen level fell so low that he was given a high-speed oxygen delivery system that included a beautiful blue-green plastic tube that was placed over his face and reminded him of an elephant’s trunk.

“If Kipling were alive now,” he remarked to his night nurse and his respiratory therapist, who were both attending him, “I’d ask him to write a story about how the old man got his trunk.”  The nurse and therapist looked at him blankly.  It was clear they had never read or heard Kipling’s  Just So Stories.  So the old man told them how the elephant got its trunk.  The story charmed them, even though he scarcely did it justice.

Curious, the old man asked his son, who had flown in from California, and his daughter if they knew the story.  They did not, even though the volume had been in their library when they were children.  Perhaps their having grown up in Israel explains this gap in their education, thought the old man.  So he asked another nurse and then another, but neither knew the story.

A crocodile did not create the old man's trunk nor was a crocodile responsible for its being taken away.  The old man's breathing slowly improved and although his blue-green trunk was beautiful, he was not sorry to say goodbye to it.  But he was sorry that the generations after him don't know what happened when a curious baby elephant, in the days before elephants had trunks, asked a crocodile, down by the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River, what he eats for dinner.