eggton

Apr 14

A Supposedly Fun Thing

There may be plenty of good reasons to go to the zoo with your kid, but it’s hard to remember any of them when your cell phone is in the public toilet behind the hippopotamus exhibit. Worse things have happened, to be sure, but I can’t think of a less hospitable place to roll up the old shirt sleeve and go fishing, as it were. And when the deed has been done–when the phone has been retrieved from the toilet like a dead body from the Hudson River–you’re allowed to mourn its loss for a while. You’re allowed to mope when you rejoin your companions at the hippopotami, and when they try to cheer you up by taking you to the “beer garden” next to the “swamp exhibit” you’re allowed to say things like if I wanted to pay $9 for a Miller Lite I’d drink at the Ritz and what the hell kind of second-rate zoo has an exhibit about wet dirt.

You’re also entitled to wonder why in the world you bought a family pass that allows you to go back to the zoo every single day for the next year, when clearly you’re never going to go again. Or at least not until you’ve bought a hat for your kid so that you don’t have to cover his bald little head with a washcloth:

. . . or pile a blanket and baseball cap on your own head in order to cast a shadow on his little face.