Nov 20, 2006

NYC: Home Of Wildlife...

And not just in the Village at 3:00am. No, for the price of donation you can visit the Museum Of Natural History on the upper west side and get your safari on. My daughter Ella, is two and a half and she's been stalking big game there (and their butter cookies from the cafeteria) since she was a crawler.

Now, as the winter months approach E and I will be spending more and more time there, since on any cold frozen weekend, the museum's a pretty cool place to graze. But the deal is, we're not the only Animal Kingdom buffs looking to avoid frigid Jan temps looking at water buffalo.

Nope, come any Sunday from now until April and any trip you take to MNH you are taking your life in your hands. In addition to the already naturally occurring masses of animals which populate the place, there's a number of holiday-season migratory clusters of beasts you won't find gaily depicted in your Audubon guide.

For starters, there's Touristo Maximus. You'll see them congregate in large groups, moving in mind-numbing slowness from exhibit...to exhibit...to exhibit. Note the large size of the males, fortified against the cold from a steady diet of high calorie sticky-carbs---buns, bars 'n cakes.

And be on the lookout for Pre-Teenus Destructus. These fast moving candi-vores drive en masse from one brightly colored exhibition to the next, sweeping away debris, people, stuffed alligators and whatever else stands in their way. Typically innocuous, they march steadily like a army ants pausing only when in proximity to the next sugar-laden snack they encounter. Do not, I repeat do not try and hide any solid or liquid containing sugar on your person if you find yourself in the oncoming path of PTD's. I have seen grown men stripped of all clothing and pride, leaving nothing but a crumpled Snickers wrapper on the floor where they once stood proudly.

Also to be wary of is Mom-us Overstressus. This species wears a clever kind of camouflage, draping their entire body in children's coats, mini-strollers and Dora The Explorer action figures. If you look closely however, you can just make out a single arm protruding from the mass attached to one of their 1.4 to 2.5 offspring. The female (they travel alone, males are rarely seen) can be marked by her call--a desperate, high-pitched call of alarm, which sounds something like "INEEDADRINK--INEEDADRINK".

So, in to that teeming sprawl of urb-animals, E and I are making the rounds. In fact, we're just coming out of the Ocean Hall Of Life, when she wriggles away from me and jets off. Now, I don't know if its the proportion of her two and half year old's body, maybe the low center of gravity combined with the piston like action she generates with her legs or perhaps its being around those feline jungle cats--but that girl is fast. Not to mention, her closing speed i.e., her speed of acceleration+the cookie/cool thing she sees=is incredible.

And that's exactly what happens. I put her down, she decides she's going to check out the Mountain Gorillas and hello closing speed aka Warp Factor Ella. So off she goes like Road Runner, my eyes doing the quick L-R scan for trouble, when my radar picks up a variable--a lone animal has strayed from its pack. Grampus Oldtimerus.

And he's moving s...l...o...w. And Ella's headed right for him. Now parenting, if nothing else is a constant crash course in engineering, physics, and a buncha other sh*t I missed in high school. But you do learn this--a well aimed toddler, moving at x amount of speed can take down an object as least five times their height (not weight) if they are applied properly to a structurally weak area. In this case, the structure was an 80 yr old. Unaided by any kind of walking support device.

And even though Ella's only five feet from me, they are on a perfect course to intersect one another. I mean, she's headed straight for the knees, classic position to drop him like a bad prom date. And to add a little more suspense--he's a bull Grampus. Even hunched over, he's easily six feet tall. Now, I'm watching the whole thing in 'ProtecoDad-Vision', which is a highly developed kind of sight that captures events at 1000th its normal speed so you can begin to experience the soul-crippling trauma a hundredth of a second before it actually occurs.

Which is right, about...now.

Ella hits his knees, just as I get there to grab him by the elbow to keep him from 9/11'ing to the floor, as he just-that-moment feels Ella beneath him and hits r-e-v-e-r-s-e. Now, things slow down even more and I watch Ella carom off his knee, but never lose her balance, giggle and keep running. Disaster number one, avoided: child is alive. Repeat, child is still alive. But I still have him by the elbow, in case he falls. And E's still running...away. So I get another hand on his opposite arm so I can keep him both a.upright and b. move past him.

So now I'm holding him and he's holding me and we're locked in some kind of dance neighter one of us expected to be in my own momentum pulling me past him as I mutter 'I'm sorry, my fault, my fault...'.

And now he's fully aware of what almost happened so he's holding on to my arms, and he repeats 'my fault, my fault'. And then, he starts laughing. Old Timer is laughing. That kind of old, deep, seen-it-all laugh that's like, older than most of the exhibits there.

There we are. Face to face. Holding each other. And he looks right at me and says 'Its no one's fault. And he looks over at Ella, beautiful little unsuspecting Ella with her pigtails and he goes "Lucky you...", and then my momentum carries me away and a moment later I'm holding Ella and I can hear his voice echo in my ears, down the hallway, in to every exhibit there "Its no one's fault".

And I get it. Its no one's fault. All of it, none of it, some of it. Its no one's fault. So yeah, its a jungle out there. But if you're lucky, every once in awhile you get face to face with one of those truly real encounters with nature.

Those painfully too real moments we try to avoid like 'chasing-down-my-dauther-I-found-myself-waltzing-with-a-six-foot-two-eighty-year-old-man'. But in those moments full of tigers and lions and bears oh my, sometimes you can find out just what kind of creatures we really are.