Audio Tracked Peacock Noises

Audio Tracked Peacock Noises

Or How My Dad and I Did the Zoo

My boyfriend tells me that I walk too fast.  I blame years of quickstepping after my father around town.  I had to take four steps to his one just to keep up.  I practically ran, panting to keep up, talking the whole time about what happened at school and at home that day.

If you dig straight down to my core, I am most like my father.  I share his vulgar sense of humor, to an extent, his enjoyment of going anywhere, even around the corner, his open book heart which will always try to save the world, his irritatingly reliable hardwork ethic, his constant frigid body temperature, and his thumbs.

My father wasn’t around a whole lot when I was growing up.  To pay the bills and put food on the table, he worked 18 hour days, 7 days a week, managing and cooking in our family restaurant.  But on occasion, he would take me on trips to the zoo.

The drive to the nearest zoo was almost an hour.  Nicknamed “Chatterbox,” I had endless stories to regale my father with during our excursion.  There were discussions about my friends at school, a new song I learned, and would piercingly sing aloud, and the clever way I got my older brother, Justin, to stop chasing me by spraying mom’s perfume on his hands.  Oh, wasn’t I just the bees knees, dad?

The drive was always the same.  A sunny day.  Me doing all the talking.  We’d pull into the parking lot, hop out of the car, and I’d skip over the grass mounds up to the entryway only to find the gates padlocked shut.  We took this exact trip together of locked up zoo gates at least three times!  Instead of sullenly turning the car around and driving home, my dad replied, “Well, we’re here.”

Dismayed and full of anguish, I was promised wild animals! Instead, I was dragged around the zoo’s perimeter, while my father cried out, “Listen to the peacocks!  Do you hear the peacocks?”  We would never actually confirm there were any peacocks as we never actually saw peacocks!

Everything was boarded up, fenced in, locked down, and surrounded by Wisconsin foliage.  Basically, you couldn’t see a damn thing!  Yet again, my father would call out, “Jess, come here!  Look through this crack, you can see bears!”  

And sure enough, my dad would have me tiptoeing on some unstable rock of a curb, pressing my eye into a rusty old fence hole, blinking past maple leaves that were bouncing in my way to see far off in the distance some brown hairy mammal that was pacing the rock wall of its habitat.

“I see one!”  I’d cry out delighted.

“Yah, he’s looking for his dinner.  I hope he doesn’t come looking for a tasty, little girl! Oh, Mr. Bear, I’ve got her!  Raaaaaaawr!  Raaawr!”  My dad would scoop me up and pretend to lift me over the fence, growling like a bear and pretending to take big bites out of my arms and legs.

All in all, it wasn’t the worst trip you could take to the zoo, if the zoo was really, really small with only one bear and audio tracked peacock noises. Thanks for the quality time, Pops!