Reading: Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles plus a passel of books I took out of the library.

Viewing: Sumatran tigers, sea otters, river otters, some ducks, frogs, and salamanders, and, oh yeah, some fish.

Moving: Nope!

Learning: that river otters are more fun than sea otters, that a species of frog native to Colorado thrives between 8 and 12 thousand feet, and stuff like that.

 

 

 

29 January 2000: Ocean Journey

Today I met Jenn and her husband Kevin at Ocean Journey. Or should I say, U.S. West Presents Ocean Journey, because that's what it says over the door. Which led to a further irony later in the day: in the middle of the Colorado River display, in a canyon-like tunnel with an intermittent flash flood, Jenn checked her cell phone coverage. Nada. "Which is weird, you know, because this is a U.S. West phone." Or something. HAO's often pointed out where I misquote her and this is a blanket apology for not quoting Jenn and Kevin exactly.

In the morning I had done exciting things like a single load of laundry (because that's how many quarters I had and we needed our long underwear for skiing tomorrow), and dropped off the recycling (except glass, which I need to bring to a friend's house), and went to the bank (except it was closed so I couldn't get quarters, just folding cash), and threw stuff at the general direction of Goodwill (except the canned goods, which I keep forgetting to bring to a supermarket), and filled up the car (at a Conoco, since they're the least of the oil companies' evils), and went to the library (which had no heat).

Since I've been being such a good workout-bee I haven't been to the library in three weeks, and I was beginning to grow hair out of my palms. So I got books:

  • Edward Eager, The Time Garden
  • E.L. Konisburg, The Second Mrs. Giaconda and About the B'nai Bagels
  • Gail Carson Levine, The Princess Test
  • George Selden, The Genie of Sutton Place
  • Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Runaways

That list is not deliberately alphabetical. Or not consciously so. I'm a librarian, what can I say. None of the books from the SLJ list that I wanted were available, so when I found unread titles by favorite authors, I scooped them up. I think Mary Queen of Scots and the God of Small Things will have to wait.

So anyway. Then it was time to go to the new aquarium. I remember seeing it from Elitch's last summer, right next door to the amusement park, but I kind of forgot that it was on the other side of the river. Still on the east side of I-25, though, so I was all thrown off. I asked a clerk at the gas station next to the Pepsi Center and without her I'd never have found the way, or at least not in the 15 minutes I had before the Appointed Time.

I looked around at the people walking through the parking lot, standing in the ticket line, and--too cold to hang outside--milling in the general inside area. From the lobby, I watched people join the queue. I saw a woman that I thought was Jenn, but she was with another woman, an older woman, so I continued looking. I knew, from Beth's forum I think, that she's 5'8"; but the only picture I'd seen of her was at a distance and in a wedding dress, which I doubted she'd be wearing today. (But you never know. I personally want to wear my gown from DMB's wedding everywhere.) From the way the two women were standing in line, I now could tell that they weren't together. So I scampered out again and scanned up and down the line. I had said something about carrying a rose in my teeth but I'd forgotten that; we just looked at each other and knew.

So. Jenn's explained how well we got along that day pretty well. I had already decided I liked Jenn from her writing and now I wanted to like her in the flesh. Another escribitionist or someone in Beth's forum recently wrote that making friends when you're adult is a lot harder than it is when you're a kid and found friendship on a common love of Mars Bars. I never realized how much on-line journals and Mars Bars have in common.

And we did work the aquarium backward. Did we walk up the wrong stairs? I'm pretty sure we entered the first doorway on the left side. And we did notice straightaway, but we didn't turn around to find the other, right doorway. And we did it again for the second exhibit. After reading her entry, it took me all morning to realize why we'd been going backward through the exhibits: we were salmon fighting our way upstream to spawn. Maybe. Well, it works with my aquatic theme.

Jeremy has exams, so he won't be coming to Colorado with Beth this spring. That is a good thing for one reason only: RDC would feel extremely left out, hairwise. He tried to grow his hair long but he could achieve only a fluffy afro. Kevin's hair might not be as long as Jeremy's, but I think it's longer than mine. I'm not sure: he was, as Jenn said, going through the aquarium the right way, and when our two ships would pass in the night, Jenn and I would be still talking. Or Jenn might have been being polite: I might have been still yammering.

dots and dashesSo. We walked and talked. We looked at lots of fishies but the only critters I really remember are the mammals. Sea otters, Sumatran tigers, and river otters. (A similar thing happened in the New Orleans aquarium, where I focused on the parrots and penguins and gazed uncomprehendingly and unstirred at various seafood.) The sea otters' tank reflected a lot of glare through the glassed wall, so they were hard to see, and the tigers were kept at a distance and didn't swim toward us, but the river otters were impossible not to see. You know how it's easier to see an object moving than one at rest? The otters seem never to rest. So I told Jenn about my ideal living room: an arboreal ceiling full of spidermonkeys, with a pond in the floor for the penguins and otters, and an island in the middle of the pond for the meerkats.

I don't know how it came up but Jenn told me there's a Christian (or Bible?) Superstore in her town. She and Kevin browsed through it and found a Jesus Action Figure, which they had to buy. She said it came with loaves and fishes. Little kids lose toys, especially small parts of toys, and I wonder if, when a child has lost all but the last loaf and fish, the Action Figure miraculously divides his accessories into a sufficient number again. I wonder if it's not kind of dangerous to do that, the way Bill Watterson didn't want to license Hobbes into a bunch of Boys from Brazil stuffed animals, which would have settled the question of Hobbes' being "real" once and for all. Jenn considered this: "But Jesus didn't start out as an action figure." So that heretical idea foundered.

yellow fishiesThere is one section of the aquarium floor set with circular windows so you can see nurse sharks napping on the sand below you. If I've stood on such a surface before, I don't remember it, and I gingerly toed the glass like my dog stepping on ice for the first time. I thought of a bumpersticker I've seen: "The next time you think you're perfect, try walking on water." I told Jenn she should have brought her Jesus Action Figure with her to test the safety glass.

I belabored the Jesus Action Figure idea entirely. (There. I've been trying to use the word "belay" for its nautical associations and "belabor" is close enough.) (And I've been using "entirely" at the ends of sentences too often entirely; it's one of the tics I picked up from Angela's Ashes and 'Tis.) I remembered the Tomato Nation entry Beth linked to in which the narrator talks about mostly-absent, superfluous husbands in the form of Ken dolls and G.I. Joe who became necessary only during adolescence to act out the naughty bits of The Thorn Birds. That, I think, is the danger of letting loose Jesus Action Figures on the world.

Jenn's telling of the Tiger Liberation in the gift shop distills the day and the mood into one pithy drop. Octopi look okay hanging from two legs (they were octopi, not squid, I'm pretty sure); just ask Security.

Marshall was busy digging a little hole in the middle of the yard with a sharp stick. He had knotted two of Security's legs together around his neck so he hands would be free for digging. Security's pear-shaped plush body and six of his black legs were hanging down Marshall's back.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Egypt Game.

who'll play fetch with him?Tigers do not. I looked at those tigers and my heart twisted. "Must--be--good! Must--be--normal!" combated "Must save animals!" in my head briefly and lost spectacularly. Their little shoulders were all dislocated, you could tell. I held one up and showed it to Jenn. "That's just wrong," she observed. To action, then. Not for the first time.

Sometimes, when I meet people, all I can think of is my stammer, my laugh that my own sister hates, my tendency to ramble, my inability to tell a story straight through or to start at the pertinent point instead of at some antediluvian other point and meandering thence like the Ancient Mariner. This day, I still had the stammer, the laugh, the rambling, and the inability, but I didn't mind. As I told RDC, sometimes I act like me without thinking about it and sometimes I act like me floundering in an attempt to act like me. Today, I acted like me and I didn't notice.

Tomorrow: no maritime references.

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Last modified 31 January 2000

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