Zoos Freak Me Out

I don't like zoos. I'm claustrophobic and it is impossible for me to be around that much lock and key without getting the anxiety.

But then my seven-year-old had the day off from school and we needed to do something. The pools are closed and the library wants my head for a desperately overdue book. The zoo it had to be.

The first clue that the zoo was going to be existential trouble for me happened in the reptile house. There was a terrarium of bullfrogs that looked just like the frogs you see in fairy stories. They were huge. I couldn't stop staring at them. Then I started staring at just this one. I swear to God he started staring back. His little arms looked like person arms.

I tried to read the expression in the bullfrog's eyes. Maybe he needed help. Maybe he was really a trapped person and if I kissed him a spell would be broken and he could be free. Is that what he wanted me to do? It would be unpleasant, but I like helping people.

"Mommy," my little girl said. "Time to move on."

We headed out of the Reptile House and to the Australian Outback. The Himalayan Forest. The Serengeti Plain. The animals looked okay. Happy enough. Sleepy. The habitats were clean.

But when I'm at a zoo, I can't stop thinking that maybe I should do something about all of that captivity. Don't they want to get away?

There was an exhibit of Burrowing Owls. There was no need to have an exhibit of Burrowing Owls. Burrowing Owls are indigent to the Central Valley. I see them all the time while I'm driving through the delta.

The tiny owl fellows bobbed and winked. "Hey lady," one of them said. "Can you spring a brother out?"

"I think the owls are telling me that they want to be free," I said.

"Owls don't talk, Mom."

We moved on to the Big Cats. Everything was fine until I got trapped into a staring contest with a jaguar. Did you know those things have yellow snakey pupils? I think he wanted to murder me. At least I lost the itch to let everyone loose.

There was a horrible roar from another exhibit. In a moment of complete and total anti-instinctual thrill-seeking, my daughter and I ran towards the roar. We checked in first with the lions. They were fast asleep. Then we hopped continents to the tiger den next door.

The Sumatran tiger paced the area. Gave us the stink eye. My daughter and I were joined by this time by several other mothers with toddlers and babies in strollers. All of the racket had attracted a crowd.

The tiger opened his enormous mouth and roared again. The two-year-old in the stroller next to me dropped his sippy cup in astonishment. Babies are closer to their normal human instincts than the rest of us. This kid pursed his lips and gave me a look that said, "Hey, shouldn't we be getting out of here? Aren't we, like, this guy's food?"

It was high time for a peaceful giraffe encounter. The exhibit is actually called Giraffe Encounter. We went there and I watched a giraffe eat leaves. Well, he was chewing something. I'm assuming it was leaves. That's what they eat on T.V.

My daughter called me. There were some turtles up to something across the way. I needed to check it out.

I went over to see, annoyed. Giraffes don't look anything like people and because of this I find them very soothing. I never get to stare at giraffes as long as I want to.

I looked to where my little girl pointed. Two big desert tortoises were doing it.

I want to say doggy style, but who says dogs invented it? Weren't reptiles around long before mammals? Maybe the dogs stole the tortoises' moves and then took all the credit.

The tortoises weren't even embarrassed. In fact, they were making quite a lot of noise. Maybe they were hoping to attract the stroller and sippy cup crowd, give the tiger a run for his money.

"That's so gross," my daughter said.

"Yeah well, it's their house," I said, steering her away. "We're the creepers in this scenario."

She thought that was hilarious. Then she forgot about it and ran toward the chimpanzees.

Luckily the chimps weren't up to anything but eating lettuce. Which is the same thing I was doing back at home an hour later, only in the privacy of a home I can enter and exit when I feel like and with nobody staring at me while I am chewing.

My Witch Baby

My eldest daughter is fifteen. She is the queen of our family. She makes healthy choices. She gets all A's in all Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She cooks for us, takes care of her little sister. She takes care of everything. She is careful about the things she does and says. She knows how to have fun, but she's definitely an eat-your-broccoli-before-your-ice-cream kind of person. I wish I was more like her.

My youngest is a different kind of girl. She is still smart, studious, polite to strangers, helpful, kind, irreverent and silly, all just like her sister. But not just like her sister.

I call my youngest Witch Baby because she reminds me of Francesca Lia Block's character Witch Baby in the Love is a Dangerous Angel series. Her hair is crazy. She makes it crazy. She slept last night with a tiny wet ponytail in her bangs so she could wake up with a cowlick. It gets so tangled in the back that wild faeries could be living in it and you would never know.

Witch Baby is seven. On a drive today her sister tried to discourage us from going to McDonald's for dinner. Witchy ripped the headrest off the top of her seat.

"You don't deserve a headrest," the Baby said. "You're not the boss."

"Your sister is the queen of the family," I said.

"She is not. Nobody is the queen of the family. Well, maybe Daddy is," the Baby said.

After dropping off her sister, Witch Baby climbed into the front. When Gimme Shelter came on the stereo I explained about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. I thought it worth noting that Kieth Richards and I have the same birthday.

"Are you the same age as Keith Richards?" she asked.

"No, he's about twenty five years older than me," I said.

"Woah," the Baby said. "So he's ninety?"

I changed the song. We sang at the top of our lungs all the way home. The Beekeeper. Tiny Dancer. Ring of Fire. Witch Baby knows all the words.

Flo rida's song came on. You know the one. "Oh hot damn / this is my jam."

"Woah," the Baby said. "This song requires lipstick."

She went into my purse and took out a shimmery pink. She applied it in a mirror. Someone swerved in front of us on the freeway.

"Christ," I said.

"Don't use the Lord's name in vain Mommy," the Baby said.

"I can if I want. I'm grown."

"No you can't," the Baby said. "That's like saying a person you really really love's name in a really mad way. It's not nice."

She's right about that of course. I turned up the music so we could sing along. It warms up our voices so that we can sing in church tomorrow.

Army Dreamers

Steven, one of my former advisory sons, came by my classroom to visit after school today. He graduated high school four months ago.

"I'm thinking of the armed forces," he said.

Steven is an accomplished soccer player and football kicker. He landed some poetic field goals in his football career. I cheered him from the sidelines while he did it.

This is a young man on his own. He has no support besides what he can rustle up for himself.

School was never Steven's thing. He hates the thought of going to college. He graduated on time but sitting in those desks all day was torture. Through high school he displayed a certain physical courage and a lack of fear of pain that freaked me out. He did jumping off of stuff tricks a lot. He hurtled himself through space a lot.

I yelled at Steven a lot.

"Why the armed forces?" I asked.

"Because I don't know else what to do," he said.

My pacifist heart yells at Steven not to go into the service. He might end up in war. He might come back broken into pieces, one way or the other.

My rational heart yells at Steven that the service is a great idea. At least the service will give him some direction, a place to live, regular income, some discipline, some skills, some training, some physical activity to do besides diving head first from one picnic table to another, aiming for the space between the bench and the table. Yes, he did this.

But I hate the thought of Steven or any young person getting skilled in killing, training for war.

"I'm confused," he said.

"Confusion is sacred at this time of your life," I said.

Steven blinked, clearly remembering why we always fought.

"Look," he said. "I can't even find a job right now."

So we made a list of options. He came up with Army and Army Reserves. I suggested National Guard and California Conservation Corps. We looked them up online and found some phone numbers for recruiters.

Meanwhile, a current advisee and the poetry club hung out in my room. My new advisee is a musician and wanted to show me pictures of his guitars on his phone. He loves guitars. He sings like an angel. My poetry club sat in a circle on the other side of the room and shared poems and wrote poems and talked about their next slam when they would perform their poems.

I'm thinking, will I be advising the musician to consider calling a recruiter in two years when he is out of high school? Is there a poet in that poetry circle who won't have a place to stay or a job to work when he graduates?

Steven finished up with the recruiting information on my computer, gave me a hug and left.

I wish for circuses, traveling shows, damn it even The Rockettes as an alternative for Steven. He kicks like an angel. Surely that must be good for something.

Young people who have limited resources have limited options. Maybe the Army isn't the worst thing for Steven. Then I look at the thousands and thousands dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and think maybe it is.

The world outside my classroom is not angels and guitars and poetry and hugs.

I hate that about the world.

New Love

I love this stage of something new. Everything is pure and exciting. The entire world is a full sack of possibility. Every tree, every cloud looks extra sharp and pretty. Everything is possible. Everything is perfect and just how I want it to be.

I have not yet written a word.

I love myself when I am with a new project. As the writer of this book, I am thirty pounds lighter with muscled arms and a flat stomach. I wear black tank tops over loose trousers. My hair is long and perfectly white. I look smart on my book jacket.

My time is my own.

I give witty interviews to Terri Gross on NPR. I rule book signings in my old neighborhoods with a beatific smile. My 25th high school reunion will be the bomb. “I saw you on the Morning Show,” everyone will say, sorry they didn’t invite me to snort cocaine with them in junior year (I would have said no anyway).

The climactic scene in the desert is perfect. The imagery and the metaphor are perfectly interwoven to create a pathos that is not too pathetic, just perfect. When people ask about it I lower my eyes and say it just came out of me that way like an egg just perfect.

Other writers will wish they were me.

I’ll get a letter from an unsuccessful writer: I have written six novels, and no agents want me. I’m overworked in a stressful job that I need to pay my bills. All I want to do is write. All I do in my spare time is write. What can I do?

In my bare feet I will walk across the hardwood floors of the million dollar Berkeley home I just bought with my latest Hollywood movie option dough. I will look out the window at the Bay. I will send a message through the wire.

Keep writing, I will say. As if you could stop.

Dead Battery

Stephen King said in an interview that teaching is not a good job for writers. He said that teaching is like having battery cables attached to your brain all day long.

This is the truest thing ever.