A Trip to the Zoo

There are two things I find most amusing, children and animals. Children are quite often funny due to their mere innocence. As they get older they find ways to make us happy when they learn what makes us laugh. Some animals do the same. However there are also times when animals do things they take quite seriously yet we as humans find quite hilarious. Such was the case at the Birmingham Zoo. It involved a pair of the most interesting orangutans I’ve ever encountered.

I don’t recall their names so I will call them Joe and Gertrude, as they remind me of a couple I met once in Kentucky. Joe and Gertrude had recently been fed an assortment of fruits, vegetables, and small brown chunks of what I assumed to be monkey food. There were banana peels, seeds, and various other scraps strewn around the concrete floor of their glass enclosure. As I stood watching, Joe appeared to be cool, calm, and carefree as he swung on the black rubber tire swing, which hung suspended from the ceiling. As he did so, Gertrude began to go about the task of cleaning their domicile.

Painstakingly, she used her long sweeping arms to gather the remains of their buffet into a tidy pile in the middle of the floor. In the meantime, Joe seemed completely disinterested in the situation. However, as I watched him closely he caught my eye for a fleeing moment and appeared to wink. I immediately realized I’d seen that look before. It was the look of mischief. The look that says, I’m going to so something I know I shouldn’t but I’m going to do it anyway. I’d seen that same look many times on the faces of my young nieces, nephews, and above all, my three-year-old grandson, Dalton.

Without warning, Joe sprang from the tire, spread eagle, right into the middle of Gertrude’s meticulous heap of litter. Needless to say, her hard work was scattered from one side of the enclosure to the other. Joe raised his arms in triumph and grinned like a donkey eating briars. I looked at Gertrude. She did not share Joe’s enthusiasm. Without another moment of hesitation she extended her long, hairy, right arm across her body as far as she could reach. With one sweeping blow she backhanded Joe directly across  his head, knocking him backwards, flat of his back, onto the hard concrete floor.

Joe quickly regained his senses. With much screaming and flailing of his arms he exercised his right to protest while Gertrude paraded around the room as though she was totally disgusted with the situation and with Joe. After a few minutes, Joe proceeded to the far corner of the room to nurse his wounded pride. At that point, Gertrude resumed her cleaning process. Occasionally, she would look at Joe, shake her hairy red hand at him, and spit.

I didn’t want to leave the exhibition of amusing primitive behavior but a crowd of onlookers was increasingly getting larger. I was beginning to feel like a caged animal myself so I decided to checkout the gorillas. It was feeding time for them also.

As I approached the outside gorilla exhibit I noticed three teenage girls leaning over the chain-link fence, which was built there to either keep the gorillas in or perhaps the humans out, I’m not sure which. They were laughing and pointing at this one large black silver-backed gorilla, which was sitting on a rock formation calmly partaking of his lunch. One of the girls was making monkey faces while the others were making nasty comments.

The pretty blonde girl shouted, “He’s so ugly his own mother wouldn’t claim him.”

The short dark-haired girl laughed and said, “Look at his hands. They look like they’re made of rubber. Gross!”

Obviously those girls had never had a close encounter with an insulted gorilla out in the open like he was. Perhaps had they known what was to come they might have stood back a little further before irritating a fifteen hundred gorilla. You see, gorillas are known for regurgitating their food. Usually they do this in order to re-chew it later. However that gorilla had other plans for his hand-full of partly digested food. Without a single ounce of remorse and with the accuracy of a major league baseball pitcher, the taunted gorilla aggressively flung the regurgitated food directly at the three girls. The sticky, dark-green substance hit the fence, splattering large globs of muck all over the three screaming girls. All three of them made a mad dash for the restroom, while I sat down on a nearby bench laughing so hard I was crying.

The zoo is definitely a place where anything can happen. I’ve seen an ostrich peck a kid on the head, monkeys drinking each others urine, and large turtles mating. I’ve even seen a distraught mother blaming the zoo attendant for her five-year-old being bitten on the finger by a squirrel while he was feeding it. Not ten feet away from the hysterical woman and the crying child was a sign, which read, DO NOT FEED THE SQUIRRELS. THEY WILL BITE. THEY ARE WILD ANIMALS.

Speaking of wild animals, my friend, Lee said she visited the Montgomery Zoo just recently. She told me how much she enjoyed seeing the lions, tigers, and bears. Everything was fine until suddenly she found herself right in the middle of the most ferocious animals in the zoo. It was a group of two and three-year-olds on a field trip from a nearby kindergarten. Now that is downright scary!

Old Photographs

Old family photos are much more than treasured memories, they are our history, our inheritance. They are proof of our very existence on this earth. Photographs capture a split second of time, which will never be repeated; A fleeing look, a gentle smile, a warm embrace. They remind us of people we have met along our life’s journey. People whose names may be lost in our memories yet their faces will never be forgotten as long as we have their picture.

I, like many of you have collected boxes upon boxes filled with old photographs. Some are old black and white pictures dating back to the early 1900’s. Among them are pictures of my grandparents, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Some of them are people I don’t even know. Perhaps they were friends of my family, old girlfriends, an old boyfriends sister, an ex-husband, or an old army buddy. Although I don’t recognize some of the people in the pictures I feel compelled to keep them.

I treasure most, the pictures of my parents, especially those of my father. He died when I was five. If not for the few black and white pictures I have of him I’m sure my childhood memory would have long forgotten his strong yet gentle face. I have pictures of him in his deputy sheriff’s uniform, one with him with his old hunting buddies, ones taken with my mother, and a very old one taken when he was in his teens. In almost every picture I have of him he wore a hat. None of the pictures clearly showed his face. I truly did not know what my father looked like or what my parents looked like when they were young. Mama was thirty-nine when I was born, Daddy was forty-nine.

A few years back I was visiting my Aunt Ruth. She was the only living aunt on my mother’s side of the family. I was going through some old photographs Aunt Ruth had stored away in her closet when I came across a small black and white photograph of my mother and father. The picture was the kind taken in the little booths at an old fashion department store. One corner of the photo was missing and there was a deep crease across the middle. It was the first close-up I had ever seen of my parents. Aunt Ruth said Mama was probably in her late twenties or early thirties when it was taken. That would have made Daddy in his late thirties or early forties.

I took the fragile picture home and scanned it into my computer. With the help of Photo Shop and Soap I was able to restore the picture back to its original quality. Looking closely at the finished product I realized my father was indeed a handsome man and my mother a beautiful women. It also made me realize how time and age takes its toll on our outward appearance. Our once youthful look is replaced by wrinkles, sagging skin, double chins, crow’s feet, and gray hair. Yet to those who love us we are as beautiful as ever.

I ran off copy after copy as Christmas gifts for my daughter, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews. Everyone seemed especially pleased. I think it was one of the best gifts I ever gave any of them. It was the first time many of the grandchildren had seen their grandparents at a young age and with such clarity.

People have always said how much my daughter, Linda, and I look alike. I decided to test that theory. I went through all the old pictures of myself and of Linda. As I sorted them by age, I was amazed to see the resemblance, from the way we smiled and held our heads to the very expressions on our faces. It was true. We looked as though we were poured from the same  mold. I made her a scrap book of the comparison between the two of us. I told her soon-to-be-new husband to look at the scrapbook very closely. I figured it was a good way to let him know, if he didn’t like the way I looked at nearly forty-years old, he wouldn’t like the way she was going to look either, therefore, he could get on down the road while the getting was good. He married her anyway.

Old photographs are precious. They take us back to a time when things were different, times were different, and our looks were different. They remind us of special events, which have taken place in our lives. They are a reminder of our past, our view of the present, and a glimpse into our future.

I’ve often heard people who have gone through loosing their homes to fire or other natural disasters say, “We can rebuild our house but we’ve lost all our pictures. Pictures that can never be replaced.”

Take time today to sit down and go through some of those old boxes of pictures in your closet. Share them with someone you love. Who knows, you may run across an old picture they’ve never seen before. Pictures often lead to stories about the circumstances upon which they were taken. Stories often turn into a wonderful afternoon shared with a family member or friend. Once you’ve gone through the old photographs, take another picture. It will be a picture of the day you shared your special memories with someone you hold dear. One day, it too will be an old photograph.

Lemons or Lemonade

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Sounds like very good advice to me. As humans we do have a choice. We can suck sour lemons or we can add water and a little sugar and drink sweet lemonade. Everyday living can make us bitter or it can make us better. We can find someone or something to blame for the pitfalls in our life or we can grab a shovel and dig our way out.

Each of us has a God given choice to make our lives better or live bitter. What we do is up to each of us. We  can hide under a a basket or we can fill our basket with all the joy and wonder life has to offer. On the other hand we can wait for someone to fill our basket for us. We can also lay blame on someone else for not giving us a full basket in the first place or we can work to fill it ourselves. Truth is, if we accomplish filling the basket ourselves, in the long run we become a much better person for having done so.

Over the years many psychologists have blamed dysfunctional family situations for everything from child abuse, rape, robbery, and even murder. In truth, just how many families aren’t dysfunctional in one way or another? Perhaps a sibling had a disabling disease, which meant the parents gave them more attention than they gave the other children. If so you are a dysfunctional family. If your mother and father divorced or you are divorced, or you were adopted, you are considered a dysfunctional family. Those are a but a few of life’s sour lemons.

Bitterness can blind you. If you are bitter because of something that happened in your past, you are apt to miss out on the wonderful things that can be happening to you in the present. If you are waiting for your life to get better tomorrow, you are missing out on a lot of happiness today. Forget about yesterday. It is gone forever. We can not change it. Don’t worry about tomorrow for we are not promised one single day just one day at a time. Live for the moment and give thanks for the lemons. I think I’ll go make some lemonade. How about you?

Cowboys: Good Guys, Bad Guys

Yes I have to admit I’m old enough to remember my favorite cowboy of all time, Roy Rogers. There was also Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Wyatt Earp, Rex Allen, the Lone Ranger, Bat Masterson, and Matt Dillon, just to name a few. They were the cowboys who made us all want to ride the range with our six-shooters strapped to our side.

The life of the real cowboy was often one of solitude. He rode the plains and prairies of the old west, exploring the new found territories of Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, and Arizona. In the movies and on television the cowboy spent much of his time facing off against the bad guys of the frontier. it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Most of the good guys wore white hats, while the bad guys always wore black.

A good fast horse was of utmost importance to the cowboy. Damsels in distress, a heated range war, or cattle rustlers meant the good guys were on their way, speeding through the dessert on their faithful steed.  Horses like Roy Rogers horse, Trigger, a magnificent, sleek, golden palomino or Silver, the Lone Ranger’s beautiful white stallion. These horses could run ten miles in a full gallop, never breaking a good sweat. They could untie any rope knot the bad guys used. They opened gates, danced in the rodeos, and could hear their master from three miles away just by his whistle.

Then there were the cowboy’s sidekick. Not only did they aid in the capture of the bad guys, they often brought humor to the storyline. Like Roy’s sidekick, Gabby Hayes, with his toothless grin and twinkling eyes. Gene Autry’s sidekick, Frog, with his croaky sounding voice and hilarious antics. Cisco and Poncho always ended there thirty minute harrowing adventure by saying “Oh Poncho.” Poncho would reply, “Oh Cisco,” as both of them laughed.

Then there were the more serious sidekicks like Tonto, the Indian who was always close by when the Lone Ranger needed help. Doc Holiday was always there to help Wyatt Earp clean up Dodge City. Matt  Dillon had Festus, a squint-eyed, tobacco-chewing deputy who was always trying to talk Doc into buying him a drink at Miss Kitty’s saloon. As I recall, Bat Masterson did not have a sidekick but his cane could easily be turned into a weapon, which he readily used to take down the proverbial bad guy.

Cowboys were the heros I grew up with. Saturday morning cartoons like Heckle and Jeckle, Donald Duck, Mighty Mouse, and Popeye were always followed by Saturday afternoon westerns. The old black and white cowboy movies and television shows inspired children of that era to make up adventures of their own. Whether it was cowboys and Indians or a shoot-out at the OK Corral, it was always fun.

My sister and her family of three girls, around my age, lived in town. When I went to visit we often times played cowboys and Indians with the neighborhood children. We would divide into two groups, the cowboys and the Indians. The cowboys wore cowboy hats and six shooters. The Indians stuck a bird feather in their hair and carried bows and arrows. Some of the kids didn’t have the proper attire but that was really the best part of pretending, using our imaginations.

One of my favorite pictures from my past is one taken when us girls were around five-years-old. Two of us have on Indian head bands while the other is wearing a cowboy hat. It was obviously taken in the summertime as were were topless, wearing only a pair of shorts.

When I wasn’t visiting my sister’s family I played alone. I had a collection of small, hard- rubber statues of horses, Indians, cowboys, and cattle. I kept them in a cigar box. I spent hours building corrals for the horses with sticks I collected from the nearby woods. I made paper cones and colored them to look like teepees. I pretended to rope wild horses and  herd cattle.

When I was in the seventh grade at Prattville Junior High School, a wild west show came to our school. I was so excited about seeing a real live cowboy. He was dressed just like the cowboys I’d seen on Television, with a buckskin jacket, silver six-shooters, and jangling spurs. He did rope tricks, threw knives at his Indian-clad assistant, and told stories about the days when cowboys ruled the west. His stories were not only about cowboys but also cowgirls like Annie Oakley and Belle Star. I learned those rough, tough, cowgirls were as much a part of the wild west as were the cowboys.

As I look back on the reign of the TV cowboy I realize what an influence they had on my life. I learned there were , are, and always will be good guys and bad guys. The side one chooses to be on will in fact determine the very outcome of one’s life. We can be a part of the solution or part of the problem. We can wear a black hat or choose to wear a white one. I’ve always preferred white hats myself.