WE'RE GOIN' TO THE ZOO, ZOO, ZOO

How about you, you, you? That lyric sticks with me from my second-grade (or so) music recital. We did it every year at the Catholic school. I'm quite sure that we sucked. In fact, now that I think about it, I wonder why they had us do the recitals at all. Anyway, that is neither here nor there. I went to the Detroit Zoo today for the first time in about ten or fifteen years. I went with Ginny and her two nephews, a four- and five-year-old. They're great kids. Right away, they called me "Adam" and reached for my hand. I felt like a dork at first, holding the kids' hands, but, by the end of the three or four hours at the zoo, they had each ridden me piggy-back countless times.

We had a good time at the zoo. Among some of the things that I pondered:

I love seeing the animals that I don't see but for on TV or in the movies, but I view them with a twinge of pain and a twinge of guilt. They're (obviously) not in their natural habitat and, though the zoo does all it can to make their prison a comfortable one, it remains just that: a prison.

There was a huge--and I mean HUUUUUUUUGE--silverback gorilla in the great ape environment. At first I hadn't noticed him because he had sort of blended in to the "boulder" upon which he was leaning. This dude was huge. And when I say "huge" I mean fat as a motherscratcher. It made me kind of sad. He was all docile and leaning against the boulder and, had he been wearing pants, they would have been the kind that Jarod from Subway squeezed into before gorging on submarine sandwiches and walking everywhere he went. Dude was fat and huge and lethargic and I was glad that I had gotten the chance to see him. See the Kellerman, there?

We also had the good luck to see a tiger. In my opinion, the tiger is the true king of the jungle. The way he moved was a joy to watch: sleek, rippling muscles...he just seemed to glide wherever he went. While we were watching, he took a dip in his pool, stayed in there for a spell and then--whoosh!--expelled himself from the water, the moisture like a transient sheath behind him. Nothin' but power.

We saw a bear. I think it was a brown bear; it wasn't as big as a grizzly. He wasn't doing much but circling his boulder...around and around and around and around again, his huge spade-like claws clipping against the rock.

Camels and peacocks were there, too. And lizards and anteaters. Anteaters, by the way, are some of the funkiest creatures I have ever had the pleasure to look upon. Their head? It's nothing but a nose. Shh. Don't tell anyone.

One pretty cool thing the zoo offered was something called the "Australian Outback." 'Twas an open area, where the zoo-goers stuck to the path and the kangeroos stuck to their fields. There was no interaction betwixt the two factions, fo' shizzle, but the guides did tell us not to feed the 'roos nor make loud noises as one of the female kangeroos had a fresh joey, ostensibly snuggled up in her pouch. Pretty cool, nonetheless. I got some snappers, but my zoom ain't all that great on my camera so they didn't really turn out too well.

And now...I'm worn out. It was a lot of walking. Made more difficult by always keeping an eye on the yo'wins. But, it was fun. To all of you scoring at home, my favourite animal was the tiger. And that, my dear friends, is why he glosses the top of this page.

Peace.