At the zoo

A sunny winter Sunday at the zoo and nearly everyone is here with children. These are young children, a good share of them traveling on a parent's hip or in a stroller. Encountering the Macaque exhibit, some like to scream with fear and excitement, but most just stare in amazement at the wonder of being new to this world. School is out today; where are their older siblings? Does enthusiasm for viewing caged animals in the company of one's devoted parents fade just a few years short of Middle School?
Many of these children old enough to talk are speaking Spanish. Or is that Spanish? Picking words out of the air, I try to guess their meaning. Presidents Day is United Nations day at the zoo, and fuels my linguistic resolve. I promise, in my next life, to become fluent in at least three languages, an enterprise best begun, of course, at the age of my Kinder-pal zoo associates. In the Siamang area, against a background of hoots and shrieks, I come upon a large extended family taking pictures and giving directions in what they assure me is Czech.
I meet a young and pretty woman who is a student in something like behavioral biology; she sits on a bench and takes copious notes of orangutan activity. The lady orang grooms her hefty orang consort, happily chewing whatever she is finding in his fur. Although the male is facing away, the female, her round face vulnerable and tender, glances, on occasion, toward the parents and children assembled just beyond the glass. It crosses my mind that the other apes, the gorillas and chimpanzees, being genetically closer to our Homo sapiens species, never appear quite so benignly naive.
Further on, a father tries to hold his unhappy toddler daughter on a fence and take her picture. I volunteer and, while suspecting the background and the elephant are totally out of range, shoot the two of them with the father's cell phone. Many decades ago, I worked as a camera "girl" at the Hyatt in SF's Embarcadero. The camera was quite large, strapped over my shoulder and braced across my lower arm. The results, as I recall, were invariably vivid, flattering, pleasing, and easy to market, particularly on holidays and birthdays. I would race to the lower hotel level to get the film developed and return with a stack in a variety of sizes.
When these children are grown, more foreign to them than the languages I now hear around us will be the concept of developing film, film itself, and even the retro possibility of taking a picture with a single function camera.