August 15, 2025
Before entering the hotel I stood in the parking lot letting the swifts swirl around me in their evening foray. The smell, the feel of the air, the quality of the light were “home.”
Drinking my coffee this AM, I struck up a conversation with Joe, who tends plants in businesses, working for a company called Ambius. He plucked dead leaves from plants so flawless I thought they were plastic. Long haired country boy-- 33, from Rootstown--he loves his job because he’s mostly on his own, unencumbered by office politics. “I’ve had a lot worse jobs.” He cuts his hair once a year, usually in April. His life philosophy is comprehensive and well worked out, a homegrown Buddhist with assists from cannabis. He is, in fact, a graduate of the Cleveland School of Cannabis, which I doubted till I looked it up. He’s a former Trumpist “pretty well fed up with the ways things are going. This is not what we were promised.” We speculated on the possibility of an asteroid or a magnitude 8 earthquake hitting Anchorage in the next few days. He was very voluble, and our conversation lasted an hour. Someone I would never have met in the ordinary course of things. Same for him, I would imagine.
Left Joe to drive to the Akron Zoo. It’s petite, only a few animals, but good fun. If I expected a rush of nostalgia from a place where I’d been many times as a child, I was disappointed. Little but the carousel is as I remember. In my time everything had a Mother Goose theme, I think, and there were bears, and a bison, and a room you could see minerals gleaming under black light. What memories I had took an odd turn. It was called Perkins Park back then, and dad resisted taking us too often because there were too many black people. I do remember the black people– though how many were too many I couldn’t tell. Where we lived and who we were we saw few black people on a normal day, so Perkins Park was like travel abroad. Things change: I counted 3 black faces in a throng that must have numbered several hundred. I remember bitterness at never being allowed to ride the exotic animals on the carousel. This was because dad feared the uncleanliness of black people, and I would be sitting right where they had sat. How many decades does it take to clear that wholly from your mind? Maybe the fact that I thought of it today it means that it requires more decades than I have given it.
Climbed up to see the Sumatran tiger. People were leaving disappointed, saying, “There’s nothing there.” I supposed there WAS something there, and asked myself where I’d want to be on a hot and sunny day if I were essentially nocturnal, and there I found him, camouflaged by stripes, asleep under a tree, quite near a side window. For a while, until someone took up the task, I stood and pointed, so visitors would not have climbed to the tiger eminence in vain. “Thank you,” the weary parents whispered. Earlier I’d watched parents and children together, and considered how inessential my life has been, no getting a brood settled around a picnic table, no comforting a tired child, no carrying sleeping babies. Nothing that was actually part of the great planetary plan. But in that moment I took comfort. I was He Who Finds the Tiger. I have always been he who finds the tiger. It is useful in the moment, in its way. It is well. I have done it with full faithfulness.
Grandparents took a table beside mine, repeating everything they said to them in Italian, so the grandkids could learn another language. It was about food, so I could follow what they said. Another mother, seizing a teachable moment, said to her competitive children, “I don’t care if I’m not winning. Sometimes I prefer not winning. Sometimes it’s fun not to win.”
The barmaid in the hotel bar is an Ellet High graduate– 52 years after me.
