A Member of the Pride

"Have you noticed they seem to be filling out zoos these days with antelope?"

Y smiles. "It's true," he nods. "They make these glorious exhibits with cool backdrops and then it's just, like, antelopes. Or gazelles. Every other exhibit. You expect something more, but they're trying to trick you into getting all excited about filler!"

We're driving home after a long day in the sun and I'm inclined to say something serious - something we'd learned that very day - about how it's probably due to so many other species gradually becoming extinct, but decide against it. Too depressing, and it's good to see Y smile. He works like a dog these days, often straight through the night. I don't know how he does it, but he feels he has to to stay afloat managing his tech start-up.

Nobody ever told us 26 was going to be so much work.

But it's Memorial Day weekend and we have Monday off. Well, scratch that, I have Monday off and Y will be working from home. Which meant Sunday was...extra!

We decide on the Wild Animal Park, part of the San Diego Zoo. They tell us we'll get closer to the animals than ever before. In my head, (and, it turns out, Y's,) cheetahs will be licking popcorn off our palms. Lions will paw us playfully as we ruffle their manes. Zebras will obviously talk to us, as in the radio commercial, and there will SURE AS HELL BE PANDAS THERE. That might or might not give hugs.

I didn't question these assumptions, though, of course, I recognize now they might have been overly optimistic. I didn't care how many Xanax they had to give the Wild Animals to induce such a level of touchable, cuddly tameness. All I knew was I wanted in. Badly.

Luckily, my husband gets just as hot and bothered about the idea of a safari as I do. And sure, Elan and Ariel would probably like it too. After all, they are a little creature-obsessed. Ariel tells me he simply cannot wait to see lions. No, wait, the leopard. No, no, not the generic leopard, he wants to see a jaguar. HE TAKES IT BACK. It's the puma he's been waiting for all his life!

My sister-in-law is floored: "A puma is a real animal? Not just a shoe?"
"If one of my boys says it, trust it, my dear."

We've got the Discovery channel in all its 50-inch, plasma-screened, high-definition glory, after all.*

When Y says what the hell, screw work, let's go, I'm ecstatic.

We borrow my mother-in-law's minivan, which is just about the most luxurious ride I know. It comes stocked with a DVD player, which I'm avidly against for shorter rides but am counting on to occupy Ariel for the two and a half hour, holiday-weekend trek into Escondido.

No good. Why would he watch Dakota Fanning in Dreamer when he can alternate professions of love for his mother with are we there yets for the entire 150 minutes? According to my Freud-quoting, prescription-wielding father-in-law, Ariel's deep into the Oedipal stage and way ahead of the curve in terms of when. And while he may find this phenomenally interesting, I am generally quite embarrassed by my son's vehement denials of my marriage to Y and insistence that we peck on the lips at least every once in awhile. A little too embarrassed to be proud of how mature he is.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about the physical love, I eat most of it up, and this kid is as cuddly as they come. But seriously? One day he suddenly noticed a framed picture of Y and I looking into each other's eyes at our wedding, and he burst into tears.

I bring this up because he's been clinging to me lately like white on rice and yesterday was no exception. And the lines were insanely long, the crowds near impossible, and while it's a pretty zoo and all, it's really nothing special - neither in terms of how close you could get to the animals (not very) and the variety of species there (um, mostly rhinos, and, natch, 2.4 million antelope).

And I could not so much as use the ladies' room without company in the stall because Ariel found any and all absences of mine to be grounds for an earth-shattering downpour of tears, accompanied by an extremely dramatic My mo-o-o-mmy LEFTED me! And Y just didn't deserve suspicious stares from strangers on his day off.

Luckily, provided Ariel and I were skin-to-skin, the kids had a marvelous time and Elan didn't seem notice that the Special Zoo was Nothing Special. On the contrary, he declared it the best he'd ever seen, and the ear-to-ear grin plastered to his face as we left would have justified a far pricier entrance fee.

Ariel, whose name means Lion (of G-d) in Hebrew, deriving from the Germanic Leo (Y's late grandfather's name was Leonard), was, as he'd warned, especially keen on the cats. The lions there spend most of their time lazing on the roof of a rusty old Jeep (ruining any real photo op), and Ariel called out to them from the safety of my embrace: "Hey, big lion! I'm a lion too, because my name means Lion! It's Aryell! My daddy even told me! I'm not scared of you because I am the same as you!"

Having foregone his daily nap, said little one nodded off in the rented stroller as we headed for the exit. We passed the Lion Camp once more on our way out, and just as I was thinking about how annoying it was going to be to have to reach into the backseat (to hold Ariel's hand) for the duration of the car ride home, a small informational sign caught my eye:

Did you know?
- That a lion cub clings to his mother for the first two years of its life?

I nudged Y and pointed. "Well, that should make you feel better," he laughed.
"It does, I guess," I only half-joked. "Except...Well, isn't ours going on three?"

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*For another post, working title: How the Impulse-Purchase of a 50-Inch Plasma Television and HD Cable Service Can Seriously Threaten an Otherwise Solid Marriage.