Why do elephants have trunks? Because they’d look funny with glove compartments.

When we got to the zoo, I raced along the paths until I found myself standing in front of Morganetta the elephant.

Who looked nothing like what I had imagined.

This was not the majestic animal featured on my Time-Life card, or in the books I had studied. For one thing, she was chained to a giant concrete block in the center of her enclosure, so that she couldn’t walk very far in any direction. There were sores on her hind legs from the shackles. She was missing one eye, and she wouldn’t look at me with the other. I was just another person who had come to stare at her, in her prison.

My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged down a zookeeper, who said that Morganetta had once been in local parades, and had done stunts like competing against undergrads in a tug-o’-war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten unpredictable and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visitors with her trunk if they came too close to her cage. She had broken a caregiver’s wrist.

I started to cry.

My mother bundled me back to the car for the four-hour drive home, although we had only been at the zoo for ten minutes.

“Can’t we help her?” I asked.

This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After a trip to the library, I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote to the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, asking him to give Morganetta more space, and more freedom.

He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response to The Boston Globe, which published it, and then a reporter called to do a story on the nine-year-old who had convinced the mayor to move Morganetta into the much larger buffalo enclosure at the zoo. I was given a special Concerned Citizen award at my elementary school assembly. I was invited back to the zoo for the grand opening to cut the red ribbon with the mayor. Flashbulbs went off in my face, blinding me, as Morganetta roamed behind us. This time, she looked at me with her good eye. And I knew, I just knew, she was still miserable. The things that had happened to her—the chains and the shackles, the cage and the beatings, maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken out of Africa—all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and it took up all the extra space.

For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make life better for Morganetta. In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resident polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It had a pool, and toys, and two older elephants.

If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the mayor that just sticking elephants in proximity with others does not mean they will form friendships. Elephants are as unique in their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not assume that two random humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants. Morganetta continued to spiral deeper into depression, losing weight and deteriorating. Approximately one year after she arrived in L.A., she was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s pool.

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve.

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it … some stories just don’t have a happy ending.

PART I

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel

that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy.

Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion,

once I was not the elephant I find I am.

My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched

trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was

somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness

and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me

to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it

in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind

I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man

of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers

breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments

with balance, the high-wire act and cones.

We elephants are images of humility, as when we

undertake our melancholy migrations to die.

Did you know, though, that elephants were taught

to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves?

Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,

tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer.

That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys:

it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

—DAN CHIASSON, “The Elephant”

JENNA

When it comes to memory, I’m kind of a pro. I may only be thirteen, but I’ve studied it the way other kids my age devour fashion magazines. There’s the kind of memory you have about the world, like knowing that stoves are hot and that if you don’t wear shoes outside in the winter you’ll get frostbite. There’s the kind you get from your senses—that staring at the sun makes you squint and that worms aren’t the best choice of meal. There are the dates you can recall from history class and spew back on your final exam, because they matter (or so I’m told) in the grand scheme of the universe. And there are personal details you remember, like the high spikes on a graph of your own life, which matter to nobody but yourself. Last year at school, my science teacher let me do a whole independent study on memory. Most of my teachers let me do independent studies, because they know I get bored in class and, frankly, I think they’re a little scared that I know more than they do and they don’t want to have to admit it.