Musical Wanderer

Before I started volunteering at the zoo, Robin and I visited the zoo regularly for years, early on weekend mornings while the creatures were still awake and active (Tip: Go to the zoo before 10 am.  After that most animals are napping and there are hordes of people, many of them wielding strollers with screaming children).  Though I'm very fond of the variety of critters in the Amazonia exhibit where I volunteer, I always try to take a walk through at least part of the rest of the zoo during my break to see what's happening with other creatures.  The closest exhibits are the big cats (lions and tigers).  I figure that if you can see a lion and a tiger every weekend, life has not become dull.  And I've learned to try to bring our camera every week, as sometimes there's something cool. I'm a sucker for cats, large or small.  It seems the zoo is as well, as the zoo has cheetahs, fishing cats, clouded leopards, sand cats, lions, two kinds of tigers, bobcat...

Forty two years ago, my best friend in high school Jon Chack and I went to the movie theater at White Flint Mall to see Star Wars (later renamed Star Wars:  The New Hope ).  The movie had been out for months, so the print was rather scratchy from incessant viewings.  But we sort of liked it, though I recall liking my old Star Trek reruns better. The movie theater as well as most of White Flint Mall has closed down.  Grass and small trees grow in the cracks in the asphalt parking lot, with only a determined branch of Lord and Taylor clinging to existence there.  Jon and I drifted apart over the decades though we caught up as many old friends do a couple years ago but, as many old friends do, drifted apart again. Star Wars, on the other hand, has done much better than White Flint Mall.  Robin and I went to see the Rise of Skywalker at the Uptown Theater in DC with reserved seats--gone are the lines snaking around the block waiting to get in, where you'd ...