Zoo Visitations
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Collette woke, eyes still watering from the cold Puck had given her.
Over at the house, between his honey wheat bagel and banana, Puck watched the trash man at work. He was just like Francis when Francis was that age, the age when becoming a garbage man had been his highest aspiration.
“He’s gonna crush some other mail!” Puck declared as the truck thundered off, somehow mixing up the duties of the garbage man with the mail man.
Meanwhile, Healthy Carrie, who was never tempted to chocolate (as Collette), was in the kitchen with multigrain toast with organic strawberry jam, raw fruit juice mixed with banana, berries, and apple, and a pile of dried cherries and dried blueberries. Puck also partook in the fruit juice, leaving a rather heavy dark pink mustache on his chubby face.
Then Puck went down to visit Francis, still snoozing. When he came back up, he had a story to tell.
“Uncle Francis says… says… a spider came into his bed while he was sleeping and tickled his foots!”
Collette also noticed that Puck had a bottle of glue in his hand that he must have picked up from Francis as well.
“I’m gonna glue dah spiders,” he said, as if it was his solemn duty.
Meanwhile, the winds were electric that day. Absolutely fantastic.
The morning was quickly spent up on getting Linnea to SAT testing and Carrie out to get her CERT ID. Back for a quick lunch and assorted odds and ends before going back out to pick up Linnea, and an unexpected visit out to the Zoo. Francis’ CC class was there with Mom and Francis’ teacher, a UK native. They had just come from a tour of the FOX and lunch.
Collette managed a quick, albeit sloppily conducted, parallel parking job (the first time since her driver’s test nine years previous) in the single last parking space left around the entire perimeter of the Zoo, which was also under construction…
And inside, while Francis walked around with his classmates, his teacher (who also spoke fluent Turkish and French and was off to visit her homeland that summer, and Italy and Scotland) and her younger son (Linnea’s age), joined Mom, Linnea, Collette, and Puck on their own tour.
The Zoo was not high on Collette’s list of interests. In fact, it was pretty much near the bottom. But Puck greatly enjoyed it, walking the full three hours himself and looking over the penguins ‘pingos’, elephants, bears, insects, etc.
At 4:00, they parted ways. Everyone back to the house except for Mom, who was joining Grandma and Aunt Petunia at the last Boathouse shrimp boil of the season.
And a comedy night that included peanut butter cookies.