(Fontanae fabula similis)
The Elephant who’s usually the quiet sort / complained one day of being much too short.
He told the Donkey that it was not fair at all. / The Donkey said: “Don’t talk like that. Look in the mirror: you are tall.”
But then the Donkey thought some more about it. / Was he himself the proper size? This troubled him and he began to doubt it.
He went to see the Goat whom he considered worldly wise. / The Goat assured him that he was exactly the right size.
But then the Goat compared herself and realized that she was rather small. / (That thought had never crossed the old Goat’s mind at all).
Now she was worried and she told that to the Fox who said: “I see.” / But then just laughed: “You look the way you should, if you ask me.”
But as the Fox himself now thought some more about the matter / it came to him that as a taller fox he also would look better.
The Fox talked to the Squirrel next about his strange delusion. / The Squirrel warned: “Tall foxes would just cause confusion.”
The Squirrel, though, was quite aware that he himself was certainly not tall. / Had fate dealt him a larger size he would not have complained at all.
He talked about that to the Mouse that night. / Mouse disagreed. She thought that all the Squirrels she had met looked right.
The Mouse, like all her kind, was truly small and others often teased her. / To gain an inch or so in height would certainly have pleased her.
“If it were possible”, she said to Madam Beetle, “to grow a bit would be my next objective.” / But Beetle said Mice need not grow, at least when seen from Beetles’ low perspective.
The Beetle, though, who’d never liked her size at all, confided to the Ant / she wouldn’t mind to be a little more like yonder Elephant.
The Ant just shrugged. “I never think of size. To be yourself and free it’s better to be small. The existential question namely, since you ask it, / is simply this: how easy can you sneak into a picnic basket!”
(c) 2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman; Picture credit: Clipart Panda