Archive

Tag Archives: animals

Birds, beasts, and bugs

December 16, 2023
Uncategorized
1 Comment

French composer Camille Saint-Saens was smarting from a concert tour in Germany that didn’t go over well, and so, in 1886, he withdrew to small Austrian village and wrote a short piece about music critics, which he called Personnages à longue oreilles, or “Characters with long ears,” in which the critics bray in imitation of asses — “hee-haw.” It is barely 45 seconds long, but it seems to have given him a bigger idea. 

And so, he wrote thirteen accompanying short, mostly comic,  compositions, each describing another animal, and had them played privately as La Carnaval des Animaux, or “The Carnival of Animals.” He wrote his publisher in Paris that he knew he should be working seriously on his Third Symphony, but that instead, he was having “such fun.” 

Yet, fun wasn’t what he wanted to be remembered for. He was to be a serious and honored composer of five symphonies, many concertos and 12 operas. And so, he refused to allow the Carnival of Animals to be published until after his death. 

The irony is that, along with his Danse Macabre and the Bacchanale from his opera Samson et Dalila, what he is best remembered for, and most loved, is this 25-minute-long musical menagerie. In fact, his best-known piece is undoubtedly The Swan, for cello and piano, the second-to-last section of the Carnival. 

Many of the pieces parody famous music by other composers and popular songs, but I want to pick out, in particular, the second section, Poules et Coqs (“Hens and Roosters”), which gets its main theme from a 1726 piece for harpsichord by Jean-Philippe Rameau, called La Poule (“the Hen”), from his Suite in G from his Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin. 

You can see the similarity, even in these few bars. 

But that set me off on a search for other music about or imitating animals. It’s not just “Old MacDonald” and his “oink, oink, here and an oink, oink there,” but in fact, a long history of musical animals. Some famous, some obscure. 

Of course, such animal imitations go back to prehistory, if we believe the musicologists, who tell us that they often feature in folk songs, from all around the world. “Old MacDonald” is only one of them in English. But there are Chinese songs, Turkish songs, Swahili songs, all with animal noises as part of their lyrics. 

But I was most interested in Western art music, after the invention of musical notation and printing, where the music could be tracked down and maybe even listened to (on YouTube when available). 

The earliest I found was from the middle of the 13th century, a ditty called Sumer is icumin in, with its lyrics “lhude sing cucu,” which have been set to various tunes, most of those I have heard include a melodic line that imitates the falling third of the cuckoo birdcall. 

No doubt because the cuckoo’s call is so distinct and so clearly a falling third, it is about the most frequently used birdsong in classical music, as we will see (followed by the trilling of the nightingale). 

Indeed, the next entry is Par Maintes Foy, by 14th century composer Jean Vaillant, which not only has the singers call out the cuckoo and the nightingale, but also the goldfinch, starling and quail. “Lire, lire, lirelon,” Toowee, toowee, toowee.” 

But it isn’t all birds. In 1505, Josquin de Prez, perhaps the most famous of all early composers, published his El Grillo, which has its singers imitate the sound of a cricket. 

Clement Jannequin (11485-1558) wrote Le Chant des Oiseaux (“Song of the Birds”) with a blackbird singing “Ti-ti, pi-ti;” the nightingale trilling on “Frian, frian;” and the cuckoo again doing his “Cu cu, cu cu.” 

Pierre Passereau (1503-1553) wrote Il est Belle et Bon, in which a wife praises her husband for being so compliant and even feeding the chickens, which she then imitates “co co co co da.” 

In his Book of Ayres with a Triplicitie of Musicke, from 1606, John Bartlett published a madrigal called Of All the Birds That I Do Know, in which words get repeated in a way that clearly evokes the chatter of birds. “Of all the birds that I do know, Philip my sparrow hath no peer … Philip will cry still, ‘yet, yet, yet, yet, yet, yet.’” 

As we leave the vocal Renaissance and enter the more instrumental Baroque age, we begin having fiddles and hautboys imitating various birds and beasts. 

Sonata Representativa (1669) by Heinrich Biber dedicates a movement each to imitations of nightingales, cuckoos, frogs, hens and roosters, quails and cats. Written for violin and continuo, it alternates short interludes with sections depicting animal sounds. After a Preludio, a Nightingale on the violin sings four eighth notes repeated and a long trill over a pedal; a Cuckoo hits repeated fast eighth notes making the usual cuckoo sound; then come Frogs with an appoggiatura of dissonant seconds, sounded together, and resolved upward, over and over to make croak; Hens cluck with upward portamento; quail have a repeated dotted rhythm “dah, da-dah;” a Cat comes mewing portamenti in nursery-rhyme-like tune; then all is rounded off with a march.

Georg Phillip Telemann wrote his Alster Overture, with a fourth movement imitating “Concertizing Frogs and Crows.” There is also a swan in another movement. 

Of course, the most famous and familiar sounds come from Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In the opening movement of the four concertos, we hear the squawking of birds. In the second movement, he has dogs barking, and in Summer, the slow movement has the strings buzzing around as a swarm of flies. 

But it wasn’t only the Seasons: In his Flute Concerto, op. 10, no. 3, “Il Gardellino,” he has the flute imitate a goldfinch. 

The keyboard is well represented, too. In addition to Rameau’s La Poule, there is Louis-Claude Daquin’s The Cuckoo and Francois Couperin’s Le Moucheron (“The Gnats”), to say nothing of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata No. 30 in E-flat, known as the “Cat Fugue,” with a tune that imitates a cat walking distractedly up a harpsichord keyboard (an early version, I guess, of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys).

 Then, there’s Georg Friedrich Händel’s Organ Concerto No. 13, known as “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” from 1739, with birdsong in the second movement. 

There’s no counting the birds, beasts and bugs in the music of Franz Joseph Haydn. He loved a good joke, and among his 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets (to say nothing of his 41 piano trios, 52 piano sonatas, and 126 baryton trios — not counting the additional 36 baryton works for that obsolete instrument with other pairings) you can find Symphony No. 82, “The Bear;” Symphony No. 83, “The Hen;” String Quartet op. 33, no. 3, “The Bird;” Quartet op. 50, no. 6, “The Frog;” Quartet op. 64, no. 5, “The Lark.” 

And in his magnum opus, The Creation, in Part 2, describing Days 5 and 6 of the biblical creation, he has the orchestra imitate multiple birds and animals, including an eagle, a whale, a stag, lowing cattle, and even a worm.

As we move into the Romantic 19th century, the animals are truly fruitful and multiply, beginning with the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which ends with a cadenza that quote quail, nightingale and cuckoo. 

So, let’s make a quick list — as quick as it can be with such a long zoo parade. There is Schubert’s song, The Trout; Robert Schumann’s Papillon and the Prophet Bird; the braying donkey in Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Chopin’s Etude, op. 25, no. 9, known as “The Butterfly Etude.” Not forgetting that it was said that Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was inspired by the composer watching his dog, named Marquis, chasing its tail.

Cats screech over and over in the Cat Duet, attributed to Gioacchino Rossini (jury’s out on the authorship). 

To continue: There are birdsongs in the woodwinds in Bedrich Smetana’s Bohemian Woods and Fields; The Flight of the Bumble Bee, from the opera Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov; The Lark by Mikhail Glinka; the Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; the “Dying Swan” and the “Dance of the Cygnets” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; and The Swans of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius. 

In Scandanavia also, we have, but Edvard Grieg: The Butterly; Little Bird; The Pig; The Horsefly and the Fly; and Cow Call. And from his contemporary Norwegian composer The Hare and the Fox by Harald Saeverud. 

Serge Rachmaninoff’s Etude Tableau, op. 39, no. 2 for piano is called “The Sea and the Gulls.” Enrique Granados wrote The Maiden and the Nightingale. And Richard Strauss caused some grumpiness and consternation in his staid German audience when, in the middle of his tone poem Don Quixote, he has the orchestra imitate a herd of sheep. But Strauss was no stranger to vulgarity: It is one of his strong points. 

Which brings us up to date with Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, which gives us, in order: a lion; hens and roosters; wild asses; tortoises, the elephant, kangaroos, fish in an aquarium, personnages a longue oreilles; a cuckoo in the woods; birds in the air (aviary); pianists practicing scales; fossils; the swan; and a finale that brings back many of the menagerie. 

But it’s not over yet. As we move into the 20th century (and the winding-up of the 19th), there are some very beautiful evocations of nature and the animals in it. Such as: Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Or the fourth movement of his North Country Sketches, called “The March of Spring: Woodlands, Meadows and Silent Moors.” 

Ralph Vaughn Williams gave us one of the most beautiful violin show-off pieces in his The Lark Ascending. He also put some swarm sounds in the overture to his ballet The Wasps. Edward Elgar wrote for voices a very peculiar piece called Owls: An Epitaph. Pianist Leopold Godowsky gave us, in his Java Suite, a movement called “Chattering Monkeys.” 

Claude Debussy wrote Poissons d’Or (“Goldfish”) in his Images, Book 2, no. 3; and his counter-Impressionist Maurice Ravel wrote Oiseaux Triste (“Sad Birds”) in his Miroirs. Paraguayan guitar virtuoso Agustin Barrios wrote Las Abejas (“The Bees”). 

Ottorino Respighi took music from early composers and reworked and orchestrated it in his Gli Ucelli (“the Birds”), with movements called “The Dove,” “The Hen,” “The Nightingale,” and “The Cuckoo.” But he goes one better in his Pines of Rome, by including an actual sound recording of a real nightingale. (Tape recorded animal sounds return later in the century.)

Whole chapters might be given over to Gustav Mahler, who began his very first symphony with cuckoo calls, and inserted all sorts of animals, birds, and natural sounds into his music, including cow bells in his Sixth Symphony and a donkey braying in his Third, so say nothing of the sleigh bells in the Fourth, fish in his song Saint Anthony of Padua Preaches to the Fishes. They show up again in his Second Symphony. Nature is never far from the surface in Mahler’s music. 

But more than in Mahler, bird song is everywhere in the music of Olivier Messiaen. The man was obsessed with bird sounds. He used them often as the source of his thematic material (I hesitate to call them tunes), not simply transcribed, but often lowered in pitch, slowed down radically, or even played upside down or backwards. 

His 1958 Catalogue d’Oiseaux (“Catalog of Birds”) is a collection of 13 pieces for piano, each of which is based on the call of a different bird, running from the Alpine chough, the Eurasian golden oriole, the blue rock thrush and the tawny owl, through the woodlark, Cetti’s warbler, the common buzzard and the Eurasian curlew. The whole catalog takes just short of three hours to perform. 

Then, there is the Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux (“Small Sketches of Birds”) from 1985, six short piano pieces, about 2 minutes each, that picture blackbird, skylark, thrush and robin. The L’Abîme d’Oiseaux (“Abyss of Birds”) is one movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. Le Merele Noire (“Blackbird”) is from Le Reveil des Oiseaux (“Dawn Chorus”), La Fauvette des Jardins (“Garden Warbler”) — on and on through his works, the birds are the foundation of his music. A devout Catholic, Messiaen saw birds and their song as emblematic of the beauty of God’s creation. 

Although, to be honest, it is usually hard to hear the music as bird calls, since they are so transformed by the composer. You kind of have to take his word for it. 

It’s hard to keep up with Bela Bartok, also. He wrote many short piano pieces, some of which bear the names of animals. But there’s The Diary of a Fly (Mikrokosmos vol. 6, no. 42), and the famous Bear Dance from his Ten Easy Pieces. 

But he is best known for the several “Night Music” pieces, from his Out of Doors suite for piano; the slow movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; and the middle of his Piano Concerto No. 3. Wikipedia lists some 20 compositions where Bartok employs his Night Music, which imitates the sounds of a Hungarian summer evening, with insects chirping, birds singing and frogs croaking. The effect can be miraculous. 

(Duke Ellington wrote his own versions of night music in his Queen’s Suite, with movements called “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” “Lightning Bugs and Frogs,” and “Apes and Peacocks.” I mention it here because, really, Ellington is classical music.)

Igor Stravinsky has elephants dancing in his Circus Polka, and nightingales warbling in his Chant du Rossignol. It has been reported that his Rite of Spring contains quotations from Russian folk songs about animals. I’m taking the musicologists’ word for that. 

Sergei Prokofiev has his own menagerie in Peter and the Wolf, and Malcolm Arnold attempted to add animals to Saint-Saens’ zoo with his own Carnival of the Animals, written for the comic Hoffnung Festival in 1960. His additions are: The Giraffe; Sheep; Cows; Mice; Jumbo; and Chiroptera (Bats) — the last of which is a joke, since the musicians “play” so high in frequency that “only bats can hear it.” The audience hears silence until a final tinkling on a bell. 

Several 20th century animal-musics were created as humor or jokes, including The Monk and His Cat from Hermit Songs, op. 29, no. 8, by Samuel Barber; The Cat and the Mouse by Aaron Copland; the Promenade (Walking the Dog), written by George Gershwin for the Fred Astaire film, Shall We Dance, and The Procession of the Cats on Solstice Night by Bohuslav Martinu. 

Then, there’s Ferde Grofe’s On the Trail from the Grand Canyon Suite, with its clopping hooves and braying donkey. 

The Critics

Francis Poulenc took on the grasshopper, bear, lion and roosters for his Les Animaux Modèles, a ballet from 1942 based on the fables of La Fontaine. 

I mentioned earlier Respighi’s recorded nightingales in The Pines of Rome. Alan Hovaness famously used recordings of the humpback and bowhead whales in his And God Created Great Whales. (George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae does not include actual whale songs, but uses electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano to imitate both whale songs and seagulls.)

And in 1972, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his Cantus Arcticus, subtitled Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, which uses recorded sounds of birds from northern Finland against a symphony orchestra. 

This list does not exhaust the trove of animal-inspired concert music, but it is what I could dig up without spending two years on a doctoral dissertation. It is a tradition that continues, both in a simple vein, as with Sally Beamish’s Songs from Hafez, which reference the nightingale, the peacock and the hoopoe, and the more avant-garde work, such as Chris Hughes’ piece for cello and bird recording, Slow Motion Blackbird, which repeats the blackbird call for six minutes, slowing down each bar of music 5 percent (without changing pitch) until it is a slow, almost unfollowable adagio. 

Most of this music is easily available, either on commercial recordings or through a YouTube video. Chirp chirp. 

Ouroboros: Infinity

Zoo story, part 2

October 28, 2017
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

TOWAN

Nearly 40 years ago, I moved to Seattle and eventually got a job at the zoo. Not a glamorous job, but rather manager of the food services. That is rather a hyperbolic name for what it actually was: A set of three iron trailers spread around the zoo from which we sold popcorn, hot dogs, soda and candy bars.

It was a good vantage point to watch human behavior and even better to observe the functioning of a zoo. I’ve written about this before, and you can visit Part 1 of this zoo story at: https://richardnilsen.com/2013/12/13/memoir-life-at-the-zoo-2/

When I started, I wasn’t the only newby. There was a new director, David Hancocks, and as with every new administration, the old hands resented the changes being proposed. Later, Hancocks proved a farsighted and innovative head of this zoo, and later the Sonoran-Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona. He won over the old hands in Seattle, but when he first arrived, there was suspicion and even hostility.

You have to remember that until the mid-1970s, zookeepers were low-level city employees. The bear-keeper had been a city garbage collector before transferring to the zoo. Few had a college degree, and Hancocks proposed to up the level of professionalism at the zoo.

Nevertheless, at the first meeting with the zoo staff, Hancocks impressed at least some of the keepers as a bureaucrat and they felt he had condescended to them.

“You know what he said at the meeting?” complained one of the monkey keepers. “You have to wash your hands after going to the bathroom. Geezuz, does he even know what we do all day? We shovel animal shit. I wash my hands before going to the bathroom.”

Everyone at the zoo was known not by their proper names, but by their descriptions: There was Monkey Man, Gorilla Lady, Large Pepsi No Ice — he was known by his perpetual order at the food stand. Gorilla Lady had a second career as a belly dancer in a local Greek restaurant. The old bear keeper, on the verge of retirement was universally known as “Grampa.”

There were Bandana Man with the giraffes, Macho Man with the apes, the Bike Woman who was in charge of the gates. I was single at the time and lonely in a new city and Bike Lady was attractive. I’ll get to her in a bit.

But I want to mention Tree. She worked the admission gate, was about six-foot-four tall and studying poison-arrow toads.

Periodically, the alligators had to be emptied of the pennies they had swallowed. Signs said not to throw coins into the gator pool, but people are jerks. If the beasts had not been disgorged of their pennies, the copper  and zinc would have poisoned them.

Needless to say, getting an alligator to cooperate was not an easy thing. They had to be sedated and a plastic hoop or funnel stuck between their jaws to hold them open. One of the first public-relations events to happen after I got to the zoo was a gator purging, and the press was invited, with TV cameras covering the event, and newspaper photographers gathered around. The gator was laid up on a table with the hoop in its mouth. A zookeeper stuck his arm down the gullet of the beast to scoop out the coins. His arm was not long enough to reach the stomach and he had to give up. A second keeper tried; his arm was not long enough either.

Finally Tree was called. She reached her long arm down, glommed onto a pile of coins and coagulated gator-gut goo and pulled it out. Everyone seemed content. Pictures had been gotten. Stories were writing themselves. But the moment Stick pulled herself out from the digestive tract of the reptile, the beast woke, snapped its mouth shut, cracked the plastic hoop into bits and writhed on the table. Talk about nick of time.

Then, there was Ape Man Jack. He was in charge of the lion-tailed macaques. Jack was a true misanthropist. He never had more than a grunt for another of his own species. But he would talk all day long with his monkeys. He had down all their idioms and seemed to fit into the troop very well. He was a sort of alpha-male to the monkeys, taking over from the dominant Junior, whenever he was around. Ape Man scowled around the zoo, glowering at everyone. But then he would come home to the monkey island and a broad grin would show — or at least he would bare his teeth to the macaques and reassert his dominance.

Grampa was a relief keeper, usually working the bears and sealions. Often, I would donate the day’s leftover hotdogs and the two of us would take them to the backstage of the grizzly bear enclosure and toss them down the bears’ gullets. Those maws were as big as the Lincoln Tunnel. There was no swallowing involved; the wieners just rattled down the chute to the bears’ tummies.

The main snack stand, where I worked, was right next to the large-ape house. I got to know the orangutans really well. They got to know me, too, and each day, as the hours wore down, I would visit Towan, the male, Chinta, his sister and mother of his child, and Melati, a small breeding female on loan from the National Zoo. Towan became my fast friend. I have a signed photo of him.

When the zoo had cleared out, the sun was setting, the peacocks screaming their banshee-calls, the siamangs whooping and the teens working for me in the stand were emptying the snot-thick hot water from the hot-dog boiler and mopping the steel floors, I would wander over to Towan. When he saw me approach, Towan would amble over to the front of his enclosure to greet me. Often, in a gesture of Orang generosity, he would stop chewing on his food and offer the chyme out to me on his extended lower lip.

We had a close relationship. He was like a bartender to me. I would pour out my troubles to him, complain about my loneliness, and he would sit opposite me, on the other side of the glass, with his forearm resting on the sill, staring into my face, listening intently. He would take the burlap cloth that was his main plaything and use it to wipe down the sill, like barkeep swabbing down the bar. It was a nearly daily routine.

In later years, after I was long gone, Towan took up art. He became famous, if that’s the right word, for scribbling with magic markers and paintbrushes on large sheets of cardboard. In this, he followed the lead of the former artistic star of the Phoenix Zoo, Ruby the Elephant, who had died in 1998, and whose canvases had sold for up to  $25,000.

I was saddened to hear, in 2016, that Towan had died, at the age of 48. He was the oldest Orangutan who had been born in captivity.

I had my name, too. Since Grampa was already taken, I was Dad to my employees — most of them high school kids working a summer job. Eventually I had two assistant managers, splitting the week between them.

One was Colin, who pronounced his name the way Colin Powell pronounces his. He was the son of a black geneticist from D.C. and a white mother. He said he was one of his father’s genetic experiments. Colin was gay and his ambition was to become a fashion model or an architect. Colin was very bright and what he lacked in dependability, he made up for in brains.

I was living at the time in a house with the world’s most obscene man and two lesbian doctors. Their names were Cam and Clink. Hard to beat that name combo. But Colin’s boyfriend was named Dick. Need I say more?

My other assistant was a redhead called the Vixen. The Vixen had a temper that blew at least twice a day — as dependable as Old Faithful — usually when customers continued to ask her the same stupid questions. “You have root beer?” “No, we have Pepsi, Sprite and Grape.” “OK, I’ll have a root beer.”

The Vixen and I got to be good friends, but I thought it wise, as her boss, not to mess with her romantically. I stayed away from all my employees — I had about 25 during the summer. But later, I learned that The Vixen was gay, too, so the question had always been academic.

When the machinery was running smoothly at the zoo, I didn’t have to do anything but supervise my help. That gave me a great deal of free time at the zoo and I used it to get to know all the animals and keepers.

Then there was Carma, a volunteer, and her mother. Nancy was 38 and dressed and acted 15. She dated a different boy each night. She collected admissions. To the zoo, I mean.

Carma was indeed 15, but she was the adult in the family. I liked Carma and we went out for lunch occasionally. The world’ most obscene man liked her, too, and tried to date her. (“Imagine, if she were only a year younger, she could get into the movies cheap!”) But she fended off his drooling, or most of it.

At the zoo, we provided coffee every day for the keepers. We had several regulars and I got to be good buddies with them. They would take their breaks with a hand around a hot paper cup of rancid black java and we would talk. One of these was an alternate primates keeper named Macho Man. He would tell me  story after twisted story about his relationship with Bike Woman. Ah, Bike Woman.

He beat her and verbally abused her. She had aborted their accidental baby. He took that as an insult to his masculinity and beat on her some more. She had him arrested for assault and he asked me one day, “Do you think I should jump bail and get out of the state? That woman is crazy. She’s out to get me. If I stay here, she’s bound to get my ass thrown in the slammer. When I think of jail, it gives me the creeps, and all because I had the gumption to discipline my woman.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Not much. I just slapped her around a bit.”

Later that day, I talked with Bike Woman.

“That bastard saw me leaving the parking lot the other day and he rammed his pickup truck into my Rabbit. Then he jumped from the cab and pulled me from the car and started hitting me in the face, calling me a whore and a slut. When I escaped from him and drove home, he followed me, trying to bump into my rear as I drove. When I got to the house, he chased me and caught me before I could get to the door and he dragged me behind the bushes and started beating on me again.”

She had a black eye and welts on her neck and legs. I don’t know how they eventually resolved their battles. I hope Macho Man found out what prison is like.

Bike Lady was attractive, about my age, and clearly in need of a more sympathetic male friend.

I asked Carma about Bike Woman. “What is her real name? How old is she? And is she married?”

Carma had previously ruined one of my fantasies with the bulletin that Tree — remember Tree? — who had blond hair and a smile that melted me every time she aimed it, was married.

“Bike Woman’s real name is Joan and she’s not married. I think she’s a bit flaky, though.”

“How?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“What else do you know about her?”

“She’s got two kids. One of them is under a year old.”

Not what I wanted to hear, but I still was interested.

The following day, I was walking from my little tin office to stand No. 3 when I hear the ratchet sound of a coasting bicycle behind me. The bike slows down. It was Joan.

“I saw you driving this morning,” I said. “I was disappointed. I thought you rode that bike to work every day.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s too far for that and besides, this old bike is too broken down. The brakes barely work.”

“So who needs brakes?” I said. “Just aim it at some children and you’ll slow down fast enough. Like a runaway truck into a sandpile.”

“I don’t think the kids are big enough to stop me.”

“So, just run into fat kids. There are plenty of them around. See, look there.” I pointed at a trio of grotesque monsters waddling along behind a grotesque mother. “The middle one is Grendel, but its’ the mama you have to watch out for.

“By the way,” I said, “Would you care to go out for dinner Thursday night. I was thinking of the India House. I haven’t been there in quite a while.”

“Well, let me think about it,” the bike stopped and Joan rested her feet on the ground. “I’d have to get a baby sitter … hmm … How about the next Thursday. That would be nice.” She gave me a broad smile.

I picked her up on the bus and we went to India. But the dinner didn’t go all that well. We were awkward together and the conversation went something like this:

“What I really want to do is go back to school,” she said.

“And what do you want to study?”

“Philosophy. I love philosophy.”

“That’s a pretty serious subject,” I said, “Are you an Aristotelian or a Platonist?”

“What are they?”

“You know, Aristotle, Plato.”

“Oh, but I mean, I’m into metaphysics.”

“Ah, but Plato is the great metaphysician …”

“No, I mean like the spirit world and astral-projection. My aunt was taken up in a flying saucer last year and communicated to them through ESP …”

My interest flagged.

But there was another woman I saw walking into the children’s zoo with Carma one day. A blond woman who looked at home in the pinstriped overalls that are a part of her uniform. She wore clear plastic glasses, totally unstylish, and my heart fluttered. No makeup, an assertive walk and interesting hands, such as you find on an artist or car mechanic.

Carma was my spy. When I needed to find out anything about anybody at the zoo, I needed only to ask Carma.

A few days later, Carma and I went up to Val’s Cafe for lunch, since we had been in the middle of a conversation when the lunch hour hit. Val’s was a greasy spoon two blocks north of the zoo on Phinney. It was run by the inevitable Greek and had to its credit two huge front windows with seats by them offering a sunny view of the gas station across the street.

Carma ordered a Denver omelet and I ordered a cheeseburger.

“Who was that blonde I saw you talking to the other day going into the children’s zoo?” I asked.

“That was Robin. She works in the CZ, with the springboks and at the Old Farm.”

“Well, how old is she?”

“I think she is about 28.”

“Is she … uh … marrrried?”

“No.”

“Does she listen to classical music?” You can see I had special requirements.

“Yeah. They all do down at the CZ.”

“Does she have any … children?”

“No kids, Richard. Don’t worry.”

My brain was abuzz. I had asked my worst and Robin had passed so far with flying colors.

“Oh, wait,” said Carma. “I just remembered that she said the other day that she will be 30 in a few weeks.”

“Thirty!  … That’s even better.”

I was becoming intoxicated. Robin wore dresses. I hadn’t seen that on a woman in quite some time and it was quite a turn-on. The only thing blonder than her hair was the sun. It turns out she had been a professional swing dancer and had lived on a houseboat. But this saga is a sad tale for some other time.