<

The excuse: everyone wanted to be there for her first trip to the zoo. Everyone. My parents, B., a few foreign dignitaries. I finally got fed up, because we're quickly entering the time of year when it's going to be too hot to take my translucent blonde child for an outing. So I said, either make arrangements to join us at the zoo today, or shut the hell up.

Arrangements were made and the zoo was visited by Clara Jane, both of her parents, her maternal grandparents, Kofi Annan, REv. Desmond Tutu and Camilla, Dutchess of Cornwall.

The highlight of the day didn't involve any non-human animals. Nope. The highlight was the fact that my child was a walking machine, ladies and gentlemen. A machine, I tell you. Granted, she had to be holding onto something at all times, but still ... she actually requested to be put on the ground so she could walk. There's hope yet that I won't have to carry her to her first day of preschool.

(Bunches of zoo-walking photos have been uploaded to Flckr, if you'd like to take a peek. Just scroll to the bottom of my main blog page.)

Pleasantly uneventful zoo visits are a rarity in my family. When we go to the zoo, there's usually an animal attack of one sort or another. It started when I was 14 at a run-down zoo in Springfield, Missouri. The poor elephants were in a cinderblock building, chained together at the ankles and seperated from the viewing public by only a big chain. People packed into the building to stare at the rather sickly beasts. One in particular looked particularly goopy and horrific. The one standing directly in front of my parents and me. Who stuck his trunk out and blew his nose all over us.

You'd think that alone would keep us out of zoos. I mean, once you've spent an afternoon trying to wipe black elephant snot out of your shirt, you'd think that would be enough zoo to last a lifetime.

Wrong. We're a tenacious bunch, my family. Which is just another way of saying we don't learn too quick.

The next incident happened a few months later. My family, accompanied by my best friend drove to the Grand Canyon, spending a few days in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

At 14, my friends and I weren't exactly girly-girls. Eighth grade turned us into a pack of sailors, and we had taken up habits such as excessive profanity usage and blatant passing of bodily gases. My dad was 40 going on 14 at the time, so we had a lot in common.

When planning the trip I guess my mom didn't take into consideration the overabundance of Tex-Mex cuisine in the region. If Clara Jane goes through this sailor phase - and she will, for she is of my loins - we'll be vacationing somewhere with very, very bland food. Like Upper Michigan, where they have three seasonings: salt, pepper, and ketchup.

After a few days of being trapped in the Fartmobile, my mom made a new rule: if we belched outloud, we had to give her a quarter. Public farts would cost us fifty cents apiece.

The next day, we paid a visit to the Rio Grande Zoo. While standing under a large tree, my mom said, "Is it raining?"

It wasn't.

Well, not in the scientific sense. Moisture was falling from the sky in the form of bird shit. From a bird the size of a condor, perched in the tree directly above my mom's head, which was soon covered in about a pint of fresh bird dookie.

You can only imagine the reaction from The Mighty Fart Brigade on that one.

"Don't worry! It's just a little sap!" an onlooker told my mom as she went into a full-blown palsey of a freak-out attack. Yeah, it's ass-sap!

My mom high-tailed it to the bathroom, where she hoped to regain her composure and take a quick bath in one of the sinks. While she was convulsing and washing her hair, my friend and I took a little potty break, since we were both on the verge of pissing our pants with hysteria.

Mom finished her little clean-up and entered a stall before my friend and I exited our stalls. In her trauma-deminished capacity, my mom hadn't noticed that we had left the stalls and were sitting on the counter ('cause we were cool 14-year-olds), waiting for her. All she knew was there was a someone in the stall next to hers, wearing shoes just like mine, and cutting the most tremendous fart in the history of mankind.

Now, my poor Mom - incapacitated and absolutely furious, did the one thing she could to try to regain control of the day. She pounded on the wall between her stall and the farter and bellowed, "That'll be fifty cents!"

My friend and I didn't even have to say a word to each other; we just knew that it was time to hightail it out of there before we started laughing at my mom yet again.

Mom, with her soaking wet hair dripping down her shirt, came marching out of the bathroom shortly after us, with the farter right behind her. She spotted us under the tree - the same tree, 'cause we were cool 14-year-olds - and turned roughly the shade of a baboon's ass as she realized she had demanded fart money from a stranger.

We didn't go to any zoos for a few years after that. Not until 1991, in Denver.

My extended family used to make an annual trip "Out West" My parents, grandparents, Cuz Wendy, her parents and brother, and Great-Aunt Helen would pack into a van and a truck with more shit than the original pioneers ever thought about cramming into a Conastoga wagon. They'd spend a few days driving, then a week living in the luxury of one RV and one pop-up camper, which is why I refuse to stay anywhere less luxurious than a Holiday Inn these days. I paid my dues the two times I took part in this traveling circus.

Now, I might remind you that my relationship with my dad has a tendency to be a bit on the volatile side. If it's volatile now, when I'm 32 years old and live three hours away from him, can you fathom what it was like when I was 18, after 12 hours driving across Kansas with him, followed by a few days trapped in a half-camper/half-tent hovel-on-wheels in the woods?

At the zoo, Wendy, her brother, my dad and I left the rest of our clan and headed for the polar bear exhibit. As you can see in the link, the bears swim in a glass-sided tank. We approached a section at an area where the water became shallow and the bears could walk up to the glass. In the viewing area, there was a knee-high bar against the glass with messages telling people to stay off the bar and the glass.

Since rules don't apply to my dad, he perched himself on the bar and leaned against the glass.

"Oh, I'm not hurting anything," he said when I pointed out he wasn't supposed to do that.

He started to say something else, but the words never came because, directly behind him, a polar bear took offense at his callous disregard for rules. Unbeknownst to my dad, she swam over, walked out of the water, stood to her full height, and slammed herself into the glass where he learned, roaring like she might take his head off and play a little water polo with it.

Dad screamed like a little girl as he fell from the bar, running and stumbling out of the exhibit, while my cousins and I were doubled over, laughing until we couldn't breathe.

Since then, Dad likes to skip the polar bear exhibits. Not so much because they put the fear in him, but because of the brutalization we put him through. Do you know how many polar bear birthday cards my dad has received since 1991? I don't know either; I've lost count. At least that visit didn't involve bodily fluids.

Not from the animals, anyway.