Chinese Version07-13-2021，Tuesday，Rain and Cloudy

My grown up son and daughter still enjoy visiting zoos. When my son came to visit us during the July of 2021, my daughter booked a trip to visit a zoo.

In early July, Greater Boston experienced unusually heavy and frequent rain so the zoo asked us to reschedule the trip. After checking the weather forecast, my daughter postponed the trip for a week, then she had to move it forward a day to avoid being rescheduled again.

I joked, “Staying at home during vacation is boring. Rescheduling the trip lets us feel changes, not bad at all.”

On Tuesday morning, we drove to the zoo in a heavy rain, luckily the rain stopped after we arrived to the zoo. On that unusually cool Tuesday in July, the big animals, lions and tigers, were not sleepy but instead were very active.

The tiger was constantly patrolling, It was my first time watching the king of the mountains so closely for so long. The black and yellow strips of tiger were eye catching. I pointed to the tiger close to us and said to my son who was born in the year of tiger, “See, the black lines in the white area above the tiger’s forehead look like the Chinese word ‘王（King）’. I often heard people saying that the tiger is the ‘king of the mountains’ in my childhood.”

The lion was very alert and I felt its staring the first time, which is very impressive. The animated movie “The Lion King”(1994) was my daughter’s most favorite movie in her childhood. The movie “features adventures of the young lion Simba, the heir of his father, Mufasa. Little Simba escapes the stampede of wildebeests plotted by his wicked uncle, Scar. Later, Simba returns as an adult to take back his homeland from Scar with the help of his friends Timon and Pumbaa.” After watching the very alert lion and taking the very slow train in the park, we went to see the hogs, because Pumbaa, Simba’s childhood good friend, is a warthog.

It was very refreshing to see the scenery and the animals, to recall the old memories of visiting the zoo with children in the past, and to enjoy our time together now.

As adults, my children fed goats which reminded me of the fun they had feeding and petting goats in their childhood in Happy Hollow in San Jose. I took a lot of photos of them interacting with the very aggressive goats. At the same time, I was also immersed in the memories of the time my children were still young.

After watching my adult children feeding spotted deer, I was eager to participate and fulfill my more than 30 year old wish of getting close to spotted deer, after listening to my college friend Li’s story about her going to the deer farm and petting spotted deer when she was an intern teacher in Guanxian County in the autumn of 1984. Li is good at telling stories. I still remember her telling a vivid joke about the beautiful “little fish”, our classmate, walking on the street of Guanxian county and unaware of attracting attention, resulting in a handsome boy on a bicycle losing his balance and falling off his bike because he looked sideways after “little fish”. While feeding the spotted deer and remembering the magic attraction of our “little fish”, I laughed silently.

Episodes

(The black lines in the white area above the tiger’s forehead look like the Chinese word “王（King）”.

(From left to right, from top to bottom) the highway with heavy rain, the alert lion, the intoxicating green on the East Coast, the patrolling tiger, the small train we took, and the hog

(From left to right, from top to bottom) we take an aerial cable car overlooking the park, my adult children fed the goats, and I fed spotted deer.